Social Media Club

Last night I attended my first Sacramento Social Media Club event – the topic? Government 2.0 & Social Media.

The panel covered a lot, and my notes are a little sketchy (I didn’t bring a notebook, so my notes are scrawled all over the speaker bio sheet), but here’s what stood out for me [my thoughts are in brackets].

Websites are moving out of IT and into Communications [in libraries, into the program/services arena]. Of course there needs to be collaboration among all groups, but IT is no longer the driver/owner of these things. Social networking policy should be decided at the management level, not in IT.

Government is intrinsically conservative/slow at adopting new technologies, but Obama campaign changed everything. From a campaign perspective, the trick now is to use tools effectively, manage client expectations. Metrics don’t yet exist to measure impact of social media – it’s there, but we don’t know how to measure it yet. Building relationships (actually, networks of contacts) isn’t the hard part – it’s keeping that network alive. Also, need to monitor social network for activity related to our organizations. [Individuals are driving this process by personal participation in social networks, the blurring of personal/professional online means institutions have a presence whether they intend to or not.]

Social media can be mapped on two scales, hype and utility/value. For political campaigns, low hype high value is preferred. [Libraries could benefit from high hype/high value – improves our image while being useful – what should we be looking at?]

Government activities:
Social Media Council of the Federal Web Managers’ Council (they don’t do acronyms) is working on best practices for social media in government. See particularly EPA work around Earth Month [and Library of Congress on flickr, YouTube, etc.] Advocating consistency, standards rather than rules. Naming conventions and more here.

Governor is highlighting State dept’s social media presences, will eventually have a directory [why isn’t the Library doing this, or connecting to it?]

Message of the day – social media moves fast, gives quick feedback. Allows us to “fail quickly and move on”.

I enjoyed the evening, it was friendly, informative, and there were snacks and beer on offer. I traded cards with a few folks, including a woman who I first noticed when she tweeted about our recent amnesty week. I left before the serious networking started, but it looked like a fun bunch of folks.

Update: Video!