Government Social Media: If You Don’t Want to Engage, Don’t Bother

There has been an unquestionable explosion of government social media use in the last year. Last week, GovTwit, the Twitter directory of government agencies and officials reported 44.9 million followers for the 3,000 IDs it tracks, after starting in 2009 with just a handful of accounts. Still, towns, agencies and leaders not using social media [...]

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Future Uncertain for Real-identity Web

The best-possible future for Gov 2.0 includes individually controlled social media sharing and the ability to turn verified identities on and off. Unlike the heydays of AOL or present of anonymous newspaper commentary, Facebook’s identity system had been helping to slowly change the culture of the Web to persistent use of real identity in social [...]

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Gov 2.0 Professional – How Can We Rock LinkedIn?

A million Twitter years ago, back in 2008, I first discovered the phrase “Government 2.0″ while bumming around various LinkedIn groups. Yesterday, Government 2.0 group creator Ric Cantrell, a Utah state govie, invited me to help manage the group, now at 3,800 members. The Government 2.0 group on LI is also where I first met [...]

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Game Mechanics: Being There (or, A Gov 2.0 Potential for Location-based Services)

The way I look at it, Gov 2.0 is more about innovation than technology. Activists in this movement have by now noted that it doesn’t matter how good the technology is if it doesn’t fill a need and if people don’t use it. Of late, I’ve been thinking more about game mechanics and how stimulating [...]

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Untethered: Work, and Life, in the Cloud

This weekend, I got the chance to meet a longtime online friend face-to-face following his trip to a local Google conference. Alan Pruitt, who I met a few years back on a LinkedIn group for private investigators, is a licensed PI out of Yuma, AZ, doing due diligence backgrounds for major employers, and he also [...]

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Keeping Up with Gov 2.0 Radio

Just wanted to give everyone a quick update on the latest at Gov 2.0 Radio.

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Big Tech’s Social Media Samurai

Social media is still smokin’ hot. Plenty of practitioners want to use arcane terms to describe their skills – ninja, ronin, maven, guru – and they often like to call each other “douchbags.” But one name accurately describes Big Tech’s moves to procure in-house social media talent. Like the warrior samurai class, these influential new [...]

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My Online Life, In Others’ Words

A few friends in the social media and Gov 2.0 community wrote this week about my actions and thoughts regarding Facebook.

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Influence. It’s work.

This post is a little bit about social media influence and a little bit about life. You hear the cliche it all the time – “there are no shortcuts in life.” And yet in the social media world it’s easy to promise shortcuts. The online influence world is populated and dominated by a muddy mix [...]

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A Jilted Lover: My Evolving Feelings Towards Facebook

While I was becoming more and more enamored with Facebook, its plans had less and less to do with me.

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