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Government 2.0

Blog archive

GSA social media timeline sputtering to a halt?

Activity on the General Services Administration’s social media timeline on Dipity has slowed to a crawl, with only a single entry added since June.

The U.S. Government Use of Social Media Timeline is a crowdsourced record of major milestones in federal agency adoption of Web 2.0 tools including blogs, wikis, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Starting with the White House’s live-streaming of the official Easter egg roll on the lawn in 2002, the timeline is a digital journalist’s dream with dozens of benchmarks such as EPA creating a blog called "Flow of the River" (July 2007) and the State Department tweeting in Arabic for the first time (February 2011).

It has had periods of inactivity before, notably a lull from February to May 2011 previously reported in this blog.

Once again, the absence of new entries raises the question: Is federal adoption and use of social media really slowing down, or are the crowds simply neglecting to crowdsource as expected? Should the timeline be retired if it’s not providing useful information anymore?

Follow Alice Lipowicz on Twitter at @AliceLipowicz.

Posted by Alice Lipowicz on Sep 30, 2011 at 12:54 PM


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Reader comments

Sun, Nov 6, 2011 Dave Hartwick D.C.

Many businesses have found social media to be essential to existing in the current technological era. However I feel federal government does not need this. It is nice to have tweets now and then from the federal government, however it is not needed. All of the news outlets cover and discuss what the federal government is doing. I feel the federal government should avoid getting to involved with social media.

Tue, Oct 4, 2011 Rob Washington, DC

Social media has its ups and downs. The most important thing about it is that it should be personal. B2B social media is much more difficult than B2C. What the government is trying to do is create G2BC Government to Businesses and Consumers. There's no magic formula it takes time and effort. It's great that the government is reaching out to people saying they way they want to engage, which is the purpose. It requires transparency from those who post and a strategy. Just because you have a FB, Twitter and Youtube lined up and linked in to your website, doesn't mean that you are "in" social media. You have to have a plan and measure the results.

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