4.1: Social Media Strategy
Develop social media strategies and initiatives that will help us accomplish our mission in transparent, participatory, and
collaborative ways
Other Information:
While it is important to digitize our records, it is also vital to "digitize our staff." By that we mean that the staff should
be not only comfortable but adept and skillful at using online tools to do their work efficiently and to engage with the public.
An important aspect of our Flagship Initiative is to develop social media strategies and initiatives that will help us accomplish
our mission in transparent, participatory, and collaborative ways. Collectively, we want to become experts at harnessing the
positive effects of social networks to achieve our mission. We want to stay ahead of the curve by anticipating technological
advances and creating a research and development environment where we experiment and innovate with new tools and approaches.
The White House has been an influential leader in social media, and we look forward to working closely with the White House
Office of New Media, as well as the social media archivist. Over the last year, we have developed a presence on a variety
of social media platforms, including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, NARAtions blog and IdeaScale. A full list of our current social
media projects are available at: http://www.archives.gov/social-media/. Concurrent with the online publication of our Open
Government Plan, the Archivist has launched a public blog to open conversations with the public and staff. We also have a
number of internal social media projects, including blogs and wikis. The Assistant Archivist for Regional Records Services,
Tom Mills, also launched a blog aimed at communicating directly with all of his staff in NARA locations nation-wide. From
these efforts, we have learned many lessons about using social media tools. Now it is our intention to create a social media
plan that sets out how we will fully integrate social media into the work of the National Archives. Our intent with using
social media is to improve efficiencies, not require additional resources. The National Archives has developed a social media
working group, consisting of staff from across the agency who are actively using social media for a variety of internal and
external projects. The group includes archivists as well as communications, records management, general counsel, information
technology, and policy staff. This group will be an incubator for new social media projects for the agency. The Digital Strategies
and Services Staff, which hosts the social media working group and is responsible for coordinating social media efforts for
the agency, will draft a social media strategy that will address a agency-wide approach to NARA's social media projects. An
interesting suggestion from the public that we plan to explore is to follow the model presented by the Smithsonian’s Web and
New Media Strategy ( http://smithsonian20.typepad.com). A further comment was submitted to publish the strategy online in
a wiki so that the public could easily collaborate on its development. We are currently exploring these ideas now. During
discussions about developing our social media strategy, the Archivist was asked what social media success at the National
Archives would look like a year from now. He responded that the agency will * Have a presence in every major social media
application. * Develop a growing sense of responsibility for NARA to be a Federal Government leader in social media. * Build
social media into our job descriptions. * Demonstrate with concrete metrics how we have improved our reach using social media.
Here are a few questions we'd like to hear your ideas on: * Where would you like to see us expand our presence online? * How
would you like to interact with the National Archives online? * What kind of mobile apps are you interested in?
Indicator(s):
|
