Tactics included:

• A social-enhanced SOTU portal at whitehouse.gov/sotu. The portal Features videos, tweets, share buttons and more.
• Blog posts encouraging following the #WHChat and #SOTU hashtags on Twitter.
• A White House tweetup on Tuesday featuring a live panel of senior advisors. There’s a great writeup on GovLoop from Alex Moll, who attended the tweetup.
• An online “enhanced” livestream of the speech with graphics to illustrate key points.  The speech was also livestreamed on Facebook and YouTube.
• Availablity of SOTU video and news to smartphone users via the WhiteHouse’s mobile apps for iPhone or Android.
• Twitter “office hours” all week, with White House staff answering questions and saving conversations to Storify.
• Vice President Biden’s first-ever Twitter interview.
• President Obama’s first-ever Google Plus hangout session scheduled for next Monday.

VP Biden (@VP) kicking off his first live Twitter chat

Will all of this emphasis on using new channels to reach citizens make a difference? I’m certain the White House hopes so.

TV ratings of the speech, a standard measuring stick for the past 40 years, showed that this year’s viewership was down 12% from last year’s address. The NY Times notes that its also the fewest number of viewers yet for President Obama, down 21% from his 2010 SOTU. I haven’t seen any reports yet that have tried to aggregate online viewership or interaction, but intuitively it would seem some of the decline in TV viewers could map to shifts in how people are watching all types of content today. With Neilsen reporting a drop in TV ownership and a move to watch on multiple platforms, the White House may be out front with its increased use of social, taking a  “fish where the fish are” approach.

Let’s hope the White House shares the results of their social State of the Union efforts so other agencies can learn what tactics work best for citizen engagement, much as they did when Kori Schulman, White House deputy director for digital strategy, spoke at a recent conference about the #40dollars Twitter campaign (read more about that campaign  in this Washington Post story).

It should be noted the GOP  had some social communications tactics built around the State of the Union, including a Twitter hashtag campaign centered on #1000days. For some detail and analysis on that effort, check out ReadWriteWeb as well as Alex Howard’s breakdown on GovFresh.

UPDATE: Twitter’s @Gov account shared this cool visualization of State of the Union Tweets

Mashable reports that “one major difference on the homepage is that tweets appear on the right side and take up less real estate than they used to.”

You can visit fly.twitter.com to learn more about the changes, and you can see some of them directly in the video below, where NASA astronaut Ron Garan (aka @Astro_Ron) is prominently featured.

Update: Brand pages are also getting a significant upgrade, Techcrunch reports.

The two big changes are a new banner just below the profile information that stretches across the page and the ability to pin a tweet at the top of each brand’s stream. This will give brands a more distinctive presence on Twitter, and should roll out more widely in the first quarter of 2012.

The pinned tweet is particularly effective for tweets with images or video. With the new design, videos and images can be seen inline within your stream (just click “Open” on the top right for tweets with images or videos). On brand pages, these video or photo tweets can be set to be open, adding another visually engaging element to the page.

You can also read about the changes on Twitter’s advertising blog. The first brands to have access to these new pages are all commercial organizations, there appear to be no federal, state or local government agencies seen in the mix, but hopefully that will soon change. The new brand pages certainly look as if they could offer significantly greater control over how an agency presents itself on Twitter.

This isn’t the first time Twitter has featured NASA in a video. The agency was also featured back in April, when social media manager Stephanie Schierholz spoke about how extensively NASA uses Twitter, including managing over 100 IDs.

Organized by Maxine Teller (MiXT Media Strategies), Peter Corbett (iStrategyLabs), Mark Drapeau (now with Microsoft), and Jeffrey Levy (Director of Web Communications, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), the Gov 2.0 Camp brought together practitioners and enthusiasts from both government and the private sector for what some have deemed “the big bang” that helped launch new thinking about how technology, people and government could come together to help solve big, hairy problems.

In doing an unrelated Internet search today, I stumbled across an archive of 5,533 tweets that were sent immediately before, during and after Gov 2.0 Camp. Compiled by Dave Witzel (a founder of Forum One Communications now with the Environmental Defense Fund) with help from Sunlight Foundation programmer David James.

While the text file isn’t the easiest read given its formatting, it’s nonetheless compelling to go back in time and look at the types of issues and challenges that were being discussed by such a diverse community. It’s also interesting to see that while we have come so far over the past three years in some respects, in some areas we are still facing the same struggles we did nearly three years ago.

Anyway, hit the pic below to take a trip in the wayback machine…

The “Google+ for Politics” page  is part of a series of guides targeting segments like Celebrities, Media, Non-Profits, Sports and Universities, and seemingly takes a cue from Facebook, which launched its “Government on Facebook” learning page in September 2009 that now has nearly 42,000 “likes.”

The Google+ guide gives basic information about the use of G+ features like the +1 button, tailoring targeted messages via circles, photo sharing and even advocates the use of G+ hangouts to spend time with constituents. It points to early uses of the service by those in government, including:

• How Senator Bernie Sanders polls his constituents for ideas or how the French governing party, UMP, and main opposition party, Parti Socialiste, share their campaign platforms on their Google+ Pages.
• How constituents expressed their viewpoints on British Prime Minister David Cameron’s post about the G20 summit through +1s and comments.
• How Michigan Governor Rick Snyder reached out to his Google+ followers to add more people to his circles.
• How Governor Mitt Romney spoke with voters through Hangouts. His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu also used Hangouts to connect for the inaugural Desmond Tutu Peace lecture.
• How French leading democrat Deputy François Bayrou shared photos from his daily meetings with constituents, or how Senator Mark Warner shared a YouTube video of his trip across Virginia to meet with local communities.

While Twitter had previously posted a case study on how the USGS uses their service, they no longer have that case study online. Twitter has yet to roll out a public-facing guide directed specifically at politicians or government agencies in the way Facebook or Google have, and one wonders if it will do so anytime soon. Twitter’s strategy to-date seems to rely more on face-to-face efforts of their D.C.-based staff of two (@colin_crowell and @adams) to ensure politician’s understand how to get value from using Twitter. While that strategy may be effective when targeting the Hill, I question how well the model scales when it comes to reaching the broader community of government agencies and politicians worldwide which would welcome best practices and guidance similar to what Facebook and Google are providing.

The slightly longer version: I recently sat on a panel hosted by Market Connections, which was releasing their third annual report around the use of social media in government (you can download the overview here), and was excited to see their latest research showed use of the GovTwit directory grew from 5% to 30% between 2010 and 2011, keeping on pace with efforts from other organizations that are much larger than my one-man-band.

I was also excited that GovTwit had recently surpassed 4,500 IDs (+300 in past three months) and was fast approaching its third birthday, having first launched on November 20, 2008. For the world’s largest government social media directory, things were running steady.

Then I learned last week that Floxee, the software and service that powers the directory, was being shuttered by its owner. Floxee was hot when it made its debut in 2009, allowing me to take GovTwit from a static listing to a service that included live tweetstreams, profile pages, follow buttons, directory stats, pics, videos and more.

Over the past year, I was hoping for a way to grow the directory beyond Twitter, to include other social media site IDs, and refresh the platform. The ability to better allow crowdsourcing of directory entries was top of the list. But Floxee wasn’t in active development, and as a personal hobby site, I didn’t have the financial resource or expertise to fund or build a new back-end for GovTwit that allow the new features I wanted to add.

With the death of Floxee, however, the GovTwit directory will no longer be available online, as of tonight (I will redirect the site to this blog). My hope is to make this just a temporary situation, and I’m open to any ideas anyone may have for how to move forward to bring the resource back online and potentially build something even better. If you have an idea on a service, a platform, or a way forward, I’m more than happy to listen. While just a “hobbyist site,” I’ve put a lot of time and effort into growing the directory over the last three years and don’t want to see it wither away.

Feel free to add a comment or lead below, send me a tweet @GovTwit or ping me via email at GovTwit@Gmail.com.

Charlie blogged about this “FedCloud” idea over at GovLoop, and the full research report is available at www.deloitte.com/us/fedcloud, but I thought one of the more creative ways they looked at explaining the idea was in the video below, and wanted to share.

The following post is republished here with permission from LocalGovChat.com’s Mike Rupert. I was just so flabbergasted to read the DCist.com story about why the @DCFireEMS has stopped broadcasting, and so impressed with Mike’s response that I wanted to share. His original post appears here.

Update: DCist.com is reporting that @dcfireems will resume Tweeting today (after a 22 day hiatus), and they posted their first new tweet shortly after 1pm today.

We're baaack! - Be Aware, Be Informed, Be Prepared. - Please Check Your Smoke Alarms - it's the simplest thing you can do to keep safe.

September 22, 2011 1:12 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@dcfireems

dcfireems

When I read the recent comments from new DC Fire ad EMS Communications Director Lon Walls in the DCist this evening my jaw literally hit the floor. Here is the quote:

“Social media is for parties. We ain’t givin’ parties.” – Lon Walls, via @dcist_updates

With all of the ink given to debunk this antiquated mindset – especially in DC over the past two years with #snowmageddon, hurricanes, earthquakes – you’d think that a professional communicator would be the last person to utter those words.

But rather than ridicule and staying in the spirit of “If you get it, share it,” I thought we’d throw a little something for Mr. Walls.

And if we’re going to have a social media party, you’ve gotta invite some folks. So who is in?

1. FEMA is in. And they’re bringing Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Twitter. FEMA Director Craig Fugate had other plans but decided, “We can adjust much quicker if we can figure out how to have this two-way conversation and if we can look at the public as a resource. The public is putting out better situational awareness than many of our own agencies can.”

2. The Red Cross has RSVP’d. Four of five (80 percent) of the general and 69 percent of the online populations surveyed believe that national emergency response organizations should regularly monitor social media sites in order to respond promptly. And it turns out Red Cross will be coming with LAFD.

3. The Los Angeles Fire Department is bringing 2 guests: @lafdtalk and @LAFD_CERT_BATT5.

4. The National Fire Protection Association wouldn’t miss it. They’re pushing all of their friends to come too.

5. The Seattle Police Department is in the house.

6. New York City will be there.

7. Lodi Police Department (New Jersey) will be there. They might check their twitter feed to get situational awareness before they come like they did during Irene though.

8. You can count on Emergency Management – “the award-winning, all-hazards publication of record for emergency management” – to be the first to arrive.

9. And I know it can be expensive to throw a party. So the Crisis Commons folks have volunteered to help out.

10. We’ve also got a poster for the “get together.” Click it to enlarge.

Feel free to invite others in the comments section.

Disclosure: I am a former communications director with the DC Government and helped lead the development of the city’s original social media strategy and launched the city’s first Twitter account @dcra and trained several others in effective use of these tools.

The numbers:

• GovTwit now features 4,284 Twitter IDs culled and tagged at all levels of government globally.
• Combined, this group reaches over 79.6 million followers.
• There are government Twitter IDs from 79 countries representing leaders of nations, federal agencies, state/regional accounts, and local IDs.
• For U.S. federal agencies, the  State Department has the largest number of IDs listed (at 282, with a companion Twitter list here), followed closely by the Department of Defense, with 252 accounts listed. HHS and related accounts take the third spot, with 99 accounts tracked.
• California leads the IDs tagged in the State & Local category with 176 IDs, Texas comes next with 106 IDs, and Florida follows with 94 IDs listed (these include members of Congress).
• Outside of the U.S., the UK is represented well with 298 accounts. Canada takes the second spot with 98 IDs, and Australia rounds out the top three nations with 38 accounts.

GovTwit may be the largest government social media directory, but it should be noted that as a hand-curated project it still captures only a small percentage of all the government entities, workers, media and contractors who use Twitter every day to share information with constituents, citizens, residents, colleagues and other interested audiences. You may want to visit this list of 50+ other directories/resources for government and politics that are also useful resources for academics, reporters, social media specialists and others that want to get a better feel for how government is adopting new media tools and channels.

As GovTwit approaches its third anniversary this fall, I hope to continue to curate content and grow the directory. I also hope to see how the underlying software platform can be expanded to allow for other URLs to be listed (Facebook, blogs, GovLoop, etc), as well as to allow self-submission to the directory. Given this is a non-profit, personal project, if anyone has ideas on how to cost-effectively accomplish these types of changes, please feel free to ping me using the contact tab above.

Update: An additional 172 IDs were added since this post was first published this morning; stats have been updated accordingly.

TweetCongress founder Chris McCroskey received a call last night from the office of  Bill Johnson, a freshman Representative from Ohio, to inform him of the breach. As being reported by  Politico and The Hill, the @RepBillJohnson account was compromised in some way for a brief period the evening of July 13. The intruder replaced the congressman’s account photo with a graphic image, Retweeted @GOPWhip and sent two brief tweets (click here to see a screen shot captured by @vincetornero Note that image is NSFW).

Yes, our account was hacked.We're working with US Capitol Police, Twitter & others 2 resolve this. We'll con't 2 tweet! http://bit.ly/qtiQdp

July 14, 2011 1:44 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@RepBillJohnson

Bill Johnson

The offending image and tweets were evidently removed within minutes by Rep. Johnson’s staff, and unlike the @RepWeiner incident, the @RepBillJohnson team is asking for assistance to get to the bottom of the breach. As reported by The Hill:

“Late Wednesday night, we learned that Congressman Johnson’s official Twitter account had been compromised by an unauthorized user. We took immediate steps to delete two unauthorized tweets and an in appropriate [sic] photograph. We are currently working with U.S. Capitol Police, House Information Security and Twitter to resolve this matter,” Johnson communications director Jessica Towhey said in a statement.

It will be interesting to see what comes of any investigation into the incident. Was the account truly “hacked” which means that Twitter has some security holes to plug? Or was the account ID obtained some other way via social engineering or phishing scheme?

7/15/11 Update

TweetCongress founder Chris McCroskey today revealed that his analysis of the account take-over does indeed appear to be a hack, but not necessarily one specifically targeting @RepBillJohnson’s account. Based on the data cached by TweetCongress and the types of information tweeted out when the congressman’s account was hijacked, McCroskey surmises that @RepBillJohnson simply was a victim of a Twitter spammer using software to infiltrate Twitter accounts via password cracking or phishing activities. McCroskey has been contacted by the U.S. Capitol Police and is providing information to assist their investigation.

Perhaps its a good time to review Twitter’s help section on what to do when your account appears compromised: