Project proposal

We hope to use this blog to share our findings as we explore the intersection of social media and government communication. None of the posts here should be seen as anything other than the observations of a small team of communicators and our attempts to find, analyze and share the information that's currently available.

Here's the gist of our project, taken from the project proposal:

Blogs, wikis, RSS, YouTube, podcasts… the world of communications is being turned inside out by the new communications technologies known as social media or Web 2.0. There is a growing interest across the government in harnessing the power of these new technologies.

To be able to communicate in today’s hot-linked environment, we as government communicators need to know more than just the basic tools and platforms of social media. We need to understand how to best leverage these tools to understand our audiences, and to reach out to them in the ways in which they want to interact with us.

We propose to draft a discussion paper on three tangents: researching the best practices on how governments and the public sector are currently using blogs and social media; whether the our department should be taking advantage of these technologies; and, if so, the steps the we need to take to integrate social media in general, and blogs in particular, into our communications practices.