8:00 a.m.
Continental Breakfast & Networking

8:30 a.m.

Chairperson's Opening of Day Two & Presentation:
Social Media As A Management, Not Just A Communications, Tool

Though most people think of social media as channels through which we communicate information, either externally to constituents or internally to employees, social media should also be understood as a management tool.  In this session, you will discover how adding a social media layer to your internal processes can yield significant efficiency gains both for managers and front line staff.  This session will outline types of management tasks and the social media platforms that can help streamline them, and will also detail specific programs that have successfully integrated social media into their operational procedures.

• Constituents to understand, appreciate, and engage their governments
• Front-line employees “manage up” more easily, and manage more aspects of their jobs themselves
• Managers to oversee and direct employees more efficiently and to produce performance reports for leaders and constituents more quickly, accurately, and easily
• Entire offices to identify, analyze, and solve problems more quickly and with 360-degree buy-in
• Government leaders to help their employees connect to each other, to digital assets (whether files or applications), to sensors, and to data so in an effort to increase the efficacy of routine functions and speed up reaction time and effectiveness of emergency-response

Gadi Ben-Yehuda
Social Media Director
IBM CENTER FOR THE BUSINESS OF GOVERNMENT
@GBYehuda

9:30 a.m.

No Resources, No Budget, No Problem: How To Launch An Effective Social Media Strategy On A Shoestring Budget

Rid yourself of the misconceptions that extensive staff/resources are necessary for your organization to begin using social media. There are several ways you can be involved in social media that are virtually no-cost, and can require the dedication of just one employee.

One of the first and most valuable steps in implementing social media is determining where your online communities already exist. Most likely they are already in place. Different social media platforms may be better suited for your agency. It is important to establish first and foremost where people are talking about you, what you do, and what’s important to you. Finding your niche community helps ensure your message reaches the people who are most interested. Big fish in small ponds make bigger ripples.

Now you must listen! Once you have found your online communities, it’s important to take time to become familiar with them. Spend time listening, digging and becoming acquainted with your communities. Learn how people interact within your communities (ie, commonly used hashtags, common topics of conversation). One of the easiest strategies for low-cost low-barrier social media in government is simply becoming a “portal of information.” Use the communities you have found online to become the authority that not only provides content created by your organization, but also aggregates information from your community (as mentioned above). Become the authority figure in your little “pond”.

• How to find your communities
• How to “listen” to what’s happening in your community using a social media aggregator like TweetDeck
• Tips on working closely with your web team allowing you to become an extension of your organization’s website
• How to manage feedback - everything to hit your website becomes fair game for social media content
• How to communicate with your audience in an effective way
• Ways to implement change in your organization using feedback garnered through social media

Sally Dadjou
New Media Specialist
RECOVERY ACCOUNTABILITY AND TRANSPARENCY BOARD
@Recoverydotgov

10:30 a.m.

Using Social Media To Strengthen Relationships Between Your Organization And Your Community

Cranberry Township constantly strives to build connections between government, residents, and business owners through the use of many different communications tools.  By adding social media tools to Cranberry Township’s communications plan, they have been able to strengthen those connections, and improve customer service by engaging people in conversations.

This informative session will discuss the path taken by Cranberry Township to integrate social media into their overall strategy, including: four different Facebook pages, a YouTube Channel, Twitter, and RSS feeds from their website.

• How to analyze current communications tools
• Proper ways to research social media tools- knowing what they are and how they function
• Deciding which tools to use - understanding your audience and how to find them
• Developing policies around new social media tools
• Integrating social media tools into the plan
• Managing time, increasing efficiency - technology can help you
• Evaluating success- best tools for measuring success

Cindy Marzock, Communications Specialist
CRANBERRY TOWNSHIP, PENNSYLVANIA

11:15 a.m.

How To Create Social Media Policies For Your Organization

We all are increasingly looking to social media to improve our services and enable greater citizen engagement. One of the key aspects of adopting these new tools involves creation of appropriate policies to encourage proper use and mitigate risks associated with using social media tools. But designing policies for social media has proven difficult, as government agencies have to contend with the blurring line between three types of social media use by government employees, namely agency, professional and personal use.

The guide, Designing Social Media Policy: Eight Essential Elements will introduce you to the eight aspects of social media use government managers need to consider when designing a social media policy for your organization. In addition, the practical application of the guide by a government agency that has used it while developing its own policy will be highlighted.

• Why do governments need a policy to begin with?
• The impact of the personal, professional and agency uses of social media for policy
• What your policy should include
• Examples of publically-available policies

Jana Hrdinova
Program Associate, Center for Technology in Government
UNIVERSITY AT ALBANY, STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Join a group of your colleagues for lunch with an informal discussion facilitated by one of our expert speakers. Take this opportunity to join others in a small, interactive group setting to network and brainstorm solutions to your most pressing social media concerns.

1:30 p.m.

Group Exercise: Brainstorm Solutions And New Ideas You Can Use

You asked for it, you got it! Interact and discuss solutions to your social media challenges with your fellow attendees and our experienced speakers. You will leave with new tools and hands-on experience and ideas for more successfully applying best practices to your own social media initiatives.

2:00 p.m.

Using Social Media To Communicate Science And Technology In Ways That Are Meaningful And Understandable To Any Audience

The portrayal of science – its practitioners, methods, and impacts – has often posed a challenge to communicators. Similarly, the scientific community has struggled to find an effective conduit through which it can communicate its stories. The Defense Media Activity’s Armed with Science project aims to bridge this divide by empowering scientists and engineers to be first-hand communicators with the public. The project has three main goals: 1) highlight the critical role of science and technology to the modern military; 2) use social media to directly interface Defense Department (DOD) scientists and engineers with the general public; and 3) “experiment” with web technology tools to influence their use and adoption across DOD.

Armed with Science content is produced primarily by scientists, engineers, and subject matter experts at DOD. Content is crafted for a lay audience with a general interest in science and technology but without formal training. This approach serves a dual purpose: scientific content is presented in a way that is meaningful and accessible to almost any audience, while contributing subject matter experts are trained to communicate their work through an entirely new style and medium.

• Using social media to communicate complicated topics in ways that are meaningful and understandable to any audience
• Creating a dynamic web communications strategy that can evolve based on metrics, new technologies, and other feedback
• Collaborating with other federal agencies to highlight synergies, engage new audiences, and improve content distribution through social media
• The importance of being authentic and giving your social media presence a face

Julie Weckerlein, Armed With Science Project Team Leader
Carla Voorhees, Armed With Science Project Team Leader
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
@ArmedwScience

2:45 p.m.

Afternoon Refreshment & Networking Break

3:00 p.m.

Using Online Challenges To Engage Employees And To Support Agency Mission

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) uses regular challenges to engage employees in solving mission-critical issues on the IdeaFactory, its idea generation platform. IdeaFactory allows TSA’s 60,000+ employees to submit ideas and endorse those they think should be implemented, while program managers evaluate ideas and report back to the workforce on idea feasibility. Employees are also able to contribute ideas to the site every day as the IdeaFactory team periodically poses special “challenges” that encourage users to

With over 20 challenges conducted to date, not only has TSA identified new ways to save the agency money and achieve its mission more effectively, but it has also identified best practices on how to design, manage and measure employee challenges.

• Highlighting best practices for designing, managing and measuring employee-focused challenges to solve critical agency issues
• Discussing the benefits of employee ideation programs and illustrate how they can be promote innovation, collaboration and communication within an agency

Megan Kenny, Deputy Program Manager
TRANSPORTATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION

3:45 p.m.

Using Citizen-Generated Content, Distributed Via Social Media, To Connect, Educate And Inspire

The NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) is the largest public housing agency in North America. In recent years, the NYCA has created, launched, expanded and measured the impact of a their unique interactive website, StudioNYCHA.org, using Facebook, Twitter, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and Web.

As with many other government agencies, NYCHA is often in the eye of the storm in the media, and as a landlord, is often mistrusted by its residents. This is an environment where the problems become the stories most often portrayed negatively in the public media of all kinds – including social.

Studio NYCHA is an effort to crowd out these stories by showcasing all the positive things that also occur in NYCHA’s housing developments. The wonderful things that happen day in, day out that represent the creative voice of its residents, the hundreds of visual arts education programs, talent shows, theatre, classic and popular music, original photography and much, much more.

• How to get the word out to your core target audience and then to the media
• How to engage the cultural players in the world, and create an active pulsating network of blogs and Twitter streams to link them all
• How to bring a creative voice to a community that never had one
• How to use social media to reach a far wider audience in new ways

Diane Chehab
Project Manager, Office of the CIO
NEW YORK CITY HOUSING AUTHORITY
@NYCHADiane

David Mechlin, Consultant
COALHART ASSOCIATES, LTD.

4:30 p.m.
Chairperson's Recap: Key Takeaways And What To Do When You Get Back To The Office

We’ll recap the highlights of the past two days and ask you to share key insights and next steps with the group.

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, Social Media Director
IBM CENTER FOR THE BUSINESS OF GOVERNMENT