The U.S. Institute of Peace is a Congressionally funded think-tank that I've worked at for nearly 4 years now. It's an interesting paradox because we're not a federal agency, but we're funded by Congress. We're not an advocacy group, but our goal is to share our research and tools for peacebuilding and peacekeeping. Here's our mission statement:
Therefore, in order to be effective and continue to receive funding, engaging people with our work is essential to our success. One of the primary strategies is using the web to disseminate and share our work. I manage and help create the online strategy for USIP.org.
The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, nonpartisan, national institution established and funded by Congress. Its goals are to help:
- Prevent and resolve violent international conflicts
- Promote post-conflict stability and development
- Increase conflict management capacity, tools, and intellectual capital worldwide
The Institute does this by empowering others with knowledge, skills, and resources, as well as by directly engaging in peacebuilding efforts around the globe.
Social networking is becoming an increasingly important part of the strategy of USIP.org, which I help craft. This strategy is a continual process that grows and evolves with trends and the needs of our audiences.
Recently, we've improved the webcasting capabilities of USIP.org. USIP often convenes public events relevant to current political issues. We've had to come up with innovative ways to reach our global audience that aren't always able to attend events in Washington. One of the ways we've chosen to do this, in addition to webcasting, is through social networking tools on the web.
On Monday, (9/21) we'll be hosting a live webcast of one of our events on preventing mass atrocities. Should be quite interesting. During the live stream, I'll be able to monitor how many people are logged in watching. In addition to advertising this event through email blasts and on our site's homepage, we've also looked at interactive ways to promote this event. USIP hosts a twitter page that I manage and am involved in. It has about 700 followers. We've advertised there too - and on Friday, I discovered that Twitter offers a neat little widget that allows you to embed live Twitter updates into your website. I'm trying to experiment and discover the best ways to maximize our visibility on Twitter, and how engaging in dialogue with users of the Twitter network can help my organization better understand what type of information interests our audiences.
We've assigned someone to tweet live during the event and assigned the event a hash tag to engage our followers in a discussion. I've also embedded the Twitter widget onto our event webpage so that users can watch the live webcast and read our tweets during the event simultaneously in one place.
Like Ben Rigby says in his book Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using the Web, using Web 2.0 tools appropriately is a successful method of engaging the public - especially youth. Rigby calls the Twitter service "microblogging": a short, informal way to have a conversation with an audience. Our ultimate goal is to engage people on policy issues related to peacebuilding through Web 2.0 tools such as microblogging.
My next posts - on Sunday and Monday - will be review the Ribgy book in more detail (so far, I highly recommend it as a go-to beginner's handbook on Web 2.0 tools. It's perfect for someone who's looking for background information to convince their organization to use Web 2.o, or who just wants to have a basic understanding of the tools) and I'll be reporting back on the success of using USIP.org's Web 2.0 strategies to engage in a two-way conversation with our audiences. I'll be monitoring how many people are logged in to the live webcast to see if our online marketing efforts paid off and I'll also be monitoring our Twitter status to see how many people engage us in conversation, how many people "retweet" our tweets, or mention us in their own posts (this would have a desirable viral effect.. more on that later), and I'll be working with our specialist who is tweeting live during the event to ensure that we are following the instructions carefully outlined in Rigby's book: keeping the messages short, conversational, and most of all, human.
Happy weekend.
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