Knox-PolandS_Week3_Blog

In a world of prolific communication technology where every business and organization that you associate with is jumping on the social network wagon, I began to wonder how our government, a “culture that is steep in traditional ideas about public relations and outreach work” (Drapeau, 2009), might be using social media to communicate their policies and promote their resources? So I decided to take a look at the US Department of Agriculture, and just to compare apples to apples (no pun intended), from my state the California Department of Food and Agriculture, to see how or if these two government agencies are utilizing social network.

Looking over the US Department of Agriculture’s website I was quite impressed with their use of “various social network providers” (Safko and Brake, 2009, p. 58). They were full scale with the latest communications sites, such as, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, book marking capabilities, and a few blogs, all in attempts to promote public “participation, connectedness, and immediacy” while requiring the government’s “authenticity, transparency, and accountability” (Postman, 2009, p.9-13). Recently Rep. John Culbertson’s (R-Tx) “experimentation with social software” demonstrated to Congress the need for adoption of social media, which would “empower members to act as bi-directional ambassadors, by bypassing traditional media to directly engage Congress on behalf of constituents” (Drapeau, 2009). I like this. After all, issues that pertain to the government and their policies that affect the citizens are being talked about daily on “open information- sharing platforms” (Drapeau, 2009), so it would benefit the government to be monitoring their constituents and their concerns, likes and dislikes, and social networking is the key.

The California Department of Food and Agriculture has a good website, they also are utilizing social media with, Facebook and Twitter, but no YouTube or blogs. Looking over their website they are not as up front about their social media sites, I had to look for them, and not having other communication tools, such as blogs, kind of made me feel that they were not really welcoming to the publics feed back on issues. Maybe with the current issues surrounding the farmers here in California and the government, they would just assume to keep feed back at a minimum. That however is not keeping farmers from talking to each other as well as everyone else in the farming community about the farming issues here in California, or farming issues on the national level.

References:

California Department of Food and Agriculture. http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/

Drapeau, M. (2009, January) Government 2.0: How Social Media Could Transform Gov PR. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/01/government-20-how-social-media-could-transform-gov-pr005.html

Postman, J. (2009) What are Social Media and Web? In SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate. Berkeley CA: New Riders.

Safko, L. (2010). The social media bible: Tactics, tools, and strategies for business success (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

US Department of Agriculture. http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome