360DigitalInfluence

I’m attending the Advanced Learning Institute’s Social Media and Government Conference and am listening to a great presentation from Stephen Miller from the U.S. Department of State. He’s been focusing alot on many of the internal and external communities that facilitate discussion from employees stationed around the world.

He recently gave an inside peek into the volume of the conversation going on inside the state department’s online communities.

Here’s a quick a snapshot of the data:

• 52 Active Communities, 41 of which are unclassified inter-agency,
• Average community receives 12,000 unique monthly visitors;
• Average community receives 30,000 page views per month
• On Diplopeida alone there are over 1,600 registered editors, 7,000 articles across the network.

All of this shows just how valuable wikis can be for large government agencies.

To be sure, it take some time for everyone to get used to the free flowing exchange of information. Apparently, in an early conversation one senior staffer saw an recently posted article on Diplopedia bringing together publicly available food prices cost of food prices and asked “Who cleared the posting of this article?” The response, which I think is a great candidate for a social media dork t-shirt: “Well, nobody, it’s a wiki.”

For a full collection of the State Department’s social media activities check out the recent AP article on a web savvy Hillary Clinton