Armed with Social Media – The U.S. Department of Defense

During my visit to The Pentagon on Friday, I had the pleasure of spending time with Roxie Merritt, Director of New Media Operations at the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs in the U.S. Department of Defense. While she is the top social media person at the U.S. Department of Defense, she also has an extensive background working with mainstream media to get the story out.

It was interesting to spend time discussing how new media is being used in conjunction with mainstream media within the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines.

Video is about 8 minutes.

Filmed with my Flip HD video camera and edited on iMovie.
Direct link to the video here.

My favorite (lightly edited) quote:

"I don’t have to do anything [to correct a blogger who gets something wrong]. Other bloggers who were in the same conversation with the subject matter experts will say 'hey you got it all wrong.'... It's not about controlling the message any more. It's about giving people as much information and resources and facts as they can."

:00 – 2:40 What the department of defense is doing to reach out to bloggers and how building relationships with bloggers is similar to media relations.

2:40 – 5:00 How the social media community is a self-correcting mechanism and how to lose control of the message.

5:00 – 5:30 On the decentralization of social media at the DoD.

5:30 - 6:00 How to reach the 65 percent of service members are digital natives.

6:00 – 7: 40 The immediacy of news and the importance of fact checking.

Watch this blog the rest of the week for a video interviews with Brian Natwick, General Manager of the Pentagon Channel and Colonel Kevin Arata, US Army, Director Online & Social Media.

Comments

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=571238795]

David, interesting interview, thanks for sharing! Enjoyed hearing you at the Air Force PA Worldwide last March. I'd be interested to hear Ms Merritt's comments on the DoD review of social media and OPSEC and also a discussion on integrating social media into combat operations.

[Matt Gentile]

Great piece David. Very interesting. I started my career at The Rendon Group in D.C. Very insightful interview.

Best Regards,

Matt

[David Meerman Scott]

Thanks Matt. How are things going over at C21?

[Maggie]

Great use of video in your blog! It was great to see/listen to your conversation about new media. Its very interesting to see how the various branches of government are using new media

[Collin Willardson]

Have you heard of Twiki?

[Jordan Spizike]

Thanks so much for this post – I just found a ton of valuable demographic info for a start-up I’m thinking about doing.There are some functions, such as Internet hosting, that in many cases are easier and far less expensive to do with an external service provider than to build from scratch internally. now link my name to see something.