Social Media and the US Coast Guard - Dtd 28 Jan 2011

8/7/2019 Social Media and the US Coast Guard - Dtd 28 Jan 2011

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Social Media and the U.S. Coast GuardRight Tool ... Right Level Right Audience

Purpose

Over the past several years, the Coast Guard has been engaged in a social media experiment. As

an early adopter of social media tools, the service has seen the social media landscape evolve

from one initially dominated by MySpace, revolutionized by blogs and bloggers, and

subsequently transformed by Facebook. During this time, best practices have emerged and this

document is aimed at articulating a strategy that will allow the Coast Guard to adapt its social

media program accordingly.

StrategyMy command teamwill embrace the use of

social media. Our plan

is to take a centralized,

focused approach to

social media Admiral Bob Papp

The Commandant of the Coast Guards vision for social media will

guide our strategy. Our social media program will complement our

media relations efforts as part of a comprehensive communications planto educate and engage our publics. And, we will utilize best practices to

deploy the right tool at the right level for the right audience.

To best position the service to take advantage of current trends in online communication and

complement the rest of our public affairs efforts, we are adopting aRight Tool Right Level

Right Audience approach to guide our use of social media.

The emergence of Facebook as the dominant social media-networking site is fortuitous as it

affords us the opportunity to communicate our message in words, pictures and video to target

audiences we might not otherwise reach through traditional media outlets. As our stories progress

from the unit to national level, we will incorporate the rest of our social media toolkit both to

maximize our exposure and to most efficiently allocate our public affairs resources.


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Operationalizing the Social Media Toolkit

Unit Level Social Media Strategy: All Coast Guard units will have the opportunity to establish

and maintain a Facebook page. A Facebook presence will allow the unit to establish a direct link

to the local community and the families of service members. Unit commanders and public affairs

officers will also engage directly with district level public affairs staff to ensure appropriate

adaptation of unit level stories, images, and video for use on district and national level socialmedia sites, and outreach to district and national level media outlets.

Area & District Level Social Media Strategy: District public affairs teams will create social media

content related to regional operational initiatives and/or regional policy. In collaboration with

units within its own area of responsibility, each district will have the option of managing a robust

set of social media tools: a district-level blog, Facebook and Twitter. The district public affairs

team will work with unit commanders and public affairs officers to solicit social media content

and to shop that content to mainstream and social media sites (this may be done via the district

PIER site). Finally, the district public affairs team will work with their respective area and

national social media teams to ensure appropriate adaptation of stories, images and video from

units within its area of responsibility.

National Level Social Media Strategy: In collaboration with area and district public affairs teams

and headquarters program offices, the national social media team will maintain the full suite of

official Coast Guard social media tools. With traffic driven from the newly designed uscg.mil

landing page, content will focus on national level policy discussions, incidents of national

significance, whole of government messaging, Coast Guard history, and feature content from the

district and unit level.

Engagement

The permeation of online social media tools into the standard communications toolkit presents

Coast Guard communicators with access to and the opportunity to engage ever-growing and

influential new audiences. Using online tools such as PIER, we can push our messages and storiesto the approximately 150 million + Americans (nearly half the population) who get at least some

of their news from online sources.

These tools also afford us the opportunity for direct two-way engagement with target audienceswhich allows us to listen to our constituencies and consider both their feedback and criticisms

of how we do business as part of our larger organizational growth process. This engagement is at

the core of our social media strategy and, in many ways, is its very reason for being.

The Coast Guard is unique as an American military force. We are defenders of the homeland, but

also a federal regulatory agency. As a result, we rely on mass communications tools to not only

broadcast our messages but to seek input from those our rules and policies govern.

The Coast Guard is headquartered in Washington, D.C., but the Service is made up of hundreds

of independent commands in communities across the country, and in many instances around the

world. As a result, our communications efforts are localized and our commanders rely on both the

good will and the first hand experience of those who call the community home to be effective

partners in mission execution.


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Perhaps the biggest challenge ahead is continued navigation of uncharted waters as a recognized

government leader in the social media field. Our strategy, therefore, must account for an ever

changing online environment and the rise and fall of social networks both in size and efficacy.

Facebook: Transforming the social media landscape

Why the heavy emphasis on Facebook? Simply put, Facebook is dominating the American socialnetworking landscape. With more than 125 million users per month in the United States (and

nearly 500 million worldwide), Facebook.com isthe second most visited website in the country

(after google.com) and its 156 million plus users1. As of March 2010 Facebook accounted for

41% of all traffic to popular social networking sites.

2

As demonstrated in the

chart on the left, only YouTube received more

unique users than

Facebook over the past

year thanks to the viral

nature of the video sharing

tool and the propensity of

its 108 million-plus

American users to view

multiple videos on the site

during any given visit.

But, Facebook remains the

fastest growing socialmedia site in America.

1Facebook.com, google.com and You Tube.com user data courtesy of quantcast.com.

2Source for both graphics on this page: http://mashable.com/2010/04/19/Facebook-social-media-traffic


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YouTube and Flickr - Coast Guard Visual Imagery Network

A significant part of the Coast Guards social media experiment has focused on the visual sharing

tools You Tube and Flickr.

As the sixth most visited website in America with more than 108 million users nationwide, You

Tube.com presents an opportunity to tell our story directly to more people than the three mostdominant news sites on the Internet - CNN (21 million plus monthly viewers), NY Times (16

million plus monthly viewers), Examiner News Service (11 million plus monthly users) after

MSN (115 million plus monthly viewers)3.

While Flickr may not have the numbers to compete with You Tube on the video front, the photo

sharing services 23 million American users represent a great forum for creating viral

conversations around Coast Guard imagery. Flickrs ability to accept uploads via e-mail also

makes the tool a great companion to the Coast Guard Visual Imagery database (CGVI) for

district public affairs officers working remotely on a breaking story and/or media deadline.

Using these tools effectively means creating a single national entry point. If we think of the Coast

Guards You Tube page and Flickr account collectively as the Coast Guard Visual ImageryNetwork and district and topical (e.g. SAR, LE, disaster response, etc.) playlists and galleries as

the channels which populate that network, we have created a pair of destination portals for our

audience which can benefit units and programs across the service from the interest any one video

or image generates.

3 User data courtesy of quantcast.com.


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Reaching our public affairs audience:Social Media and Media Relations

Portals represent the most popular online

destinations for news. The most visited online news

sites are Yahoo! and Microsofts msn.com with

averages of 123 and 115 million monthly among

U.S. users. Their audiences are primarily 18-49

year-olds although they do have respectable

followings in the 13-17 year-old and 50+ year-old

demographics. Huffingtonpost.com (22 million)

and CNN.com (21 million) are the most popular

news sites with above average Internet followings

among 50+ year-old Americans.

Social media networks are strongest in the 13-35

year-old demographic. Facebook derives 66% of its

audience from these critical youth and young adult

markets. You Tube finds 57% of its audience here

whereas 70% of Blogspots audience comes from

this growing demographic.

There is little question that social media represents

a biased competition to traditional media models.

Every reputable print or broadcast media outlet has

an online presence and many are directly engaging

social media networks in an effort to win over

critical demographics that turn almost exclusively

to online sources for news and analysis.

Yet, the healthy overlap between social medianetworks and online news sites within the 18-34

year-old demographic provides us with optimal

audience saturation between our social media and

media relations activities within the Coast Guard.

Media Relations use of PIER and aggressive

marketing to traditional outlets combined with a

focus on the fastest growing and most popular

social networks is a winning strategy.

Source: http://www.quantcast.com

(Internet averages based on mean audience size for the

top million websites as determined by quantcast)

Facebook

Yahoo!

MSN

You Tube

Huffington Post

CNN


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The way ahead

In the coming weeks, the Coast Guard Headquarters Social Media Team will release a series of

documents to assist unit, district and national staffs in the implementation of this new online

communications strategy.

First up will be information on how to request approval for new social media sites, implicationsfor existing social media sites inconsistent withRight Tool Right Level Right Audienceapproach, guidance for off-duty social media engagement by Coast Guard personnel on personal

or unofficial sites, and guidance for official engagement with third-party social media sites.

The Social Media Team will also release a series of documents with further guidance on best

practices and engagement strategies for each of the tools in the Coast Guard social media tool kit.

Conclusion

After several years of experimentation, the Coast Guards social media program is poised to

adopt a communications strategy based on best practices and guided by the Commandant of the

Coast Guards vision. This evolution of the social media program is a testament to the leadershipof Admiral Thad Allen and represents Admiral Bob Papps embrace of social media as a

communications tool.

Following the principles ofRight Tool Right Level Right Audience, the Coast Guard will

centralize and focus our use of social media tools to complement our media relations program and

maximize our impact with unique audiences.

Social Media and the US Coast Guard - Dtd 28 Jan 2011

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