GSA course aims to train government social media leaders

Every federal agency could benefit from engaging more on social media, but different agencies ought to engage in different ways, said Gadi Ben-Yehuda, who will be teaching a 12-week government-sponsored course beginning in February.

Social media engagement can run the gamut from taking public input on new policies through Twitter, Facebook and custom-built wikis to adding new social media customer service components for taxpayers or Social Security recipients to simply doing a better job of broadcasting agency information, said Ben-Yehuda, who is also the social media director for IBM's Center for the Business of Government think tank.

"The government is not monolithic," he said. "An agency like the State Department is all about engagement . . . Another agency like [the Justice Department] is not about engagement per se, it's about enforcing rules . . . They have such widely divergent goals that necessarily their social media tools are going to be different."

Ben-Yehuda's course on social media in government will be the most in-depth yet offered by the General Services Administration's Web Manager University. In the past, WMU has mostly touched on social media through one-off webinars and training sessions. Officials decided to offer the full-length course based on numerous requests from employees who have attended those webinars and are considering offering it for continuing education units in the future, according to GSA spokesman Robert Lesino.

Ben-Yehuda said he plans to divide each class session into three parts. The first will focus on class reading about theories of community formation and digital communication, the second will be devoted to in-class training on wiki-building and writing for social media, and the third will be organized around a guest speaker from government or industry.

Two confirmed speakers are Lovisa Williams, a senior policy adviser at State who focuses on social media and public diplomacy, and Steve Ressler, founder of the government-focused social networking site GovLoop.

In addition to determining which social media fit a particular agency need, Ben-Yehuda said he also wants to teach students how to judge when social media can realistically aid an agency, when it can't and what the drawbacks are.

There are limitations to social media that, if not accounted for, can end up making an initiative less useful or even counterproductive, he said. The briskness of much social media communication, for instance, often omits the nuance of longer-form communication, he said, which can leave users feeling confused or even offended. And, while research can suggest whether people will engage with a particular social media initiative, organizers can never guarantee people will show up or be civil when they do.

"If you stand up and you talk in a real town hall meeting you have to show your face," he said. "After the meeting someone can confront you about what you said. And these are your neighbors, people you literally have to live with. In social media, you can hide behind a mask of anonymity and leave your snarky little comment and then run away, and that pollutes the entire conversation."

At the same time, however, social media also enables government to interact with citizens on a deeper level than was ever possible before. And the drastic rise in social media use and smartphone ownership means citizens expect to be able to communicate with government on short notice and through multiple different paths.

"More than anything, that's what I want people in the class to start thinking about," he said. "Asking, can we add a social layer to this program? Would it add value at all? Would it help? Then if we do add a social layer, what are the best tools to use? I want to get beyond just talking about Facebook, Flickr and YouTube."

The original version of this story incorrectly described the reason GSA decided to offer the full-length course. The story has been corrected.