• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 7, 2009

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the government unit known as the "investigative arm of Congress," has launched a presence on YouTube and Twitter. Chuck Young, GAO's managing director of public affairs, says the video and microblogging sites aim to help the agency keep people informed about GAO's work.

Tapping into YouTube to share videos, the GAO put up a channel that Young says the agency will use as a "communications tool" to post videos, including some from its Recovery Act and Transition Web pages. The main featured video is "More Than Numbers," a recruitment video based on news coverage of GAO's work.

The GAO created two Twitter feeds to reports and testimony, @tusgao, and legal reports, @usgaolegal, to assist people interested in reading more about the agency's findings, conclusions and recommendations. "It's part of the GAO's overall 2.0 effort to take information to the people, wherever they are, rather than wait for them to come to our Web site," Young says. He calls GAO's move toward social technologies "a natural evolution," rather than prompted from changes initiated at the top by U.S. President Barack Obama and the new White House administration.

In fact, the GAO has formed a committee to review a variety of technologies to build on its presence in Google's YouTube, as well as Twitter. Efforts are being led by the Quality and Continuous Improvement team. Aside from reviewing emerging social tools and technologies, the 30 members will look at making reports easy to read on several platforms and mobile devices, such as RIM's BlackBerry and Apple's iPhone.

Forrester Research Senior Analyst Jeremiah Owyang says social media has become the new communication tool. Emphasizing the trend, 69% of people in 2008 consumed, watched, read or listened to socially created content through social media -- up from 48% in 2007. "We are seeing adoption in other government agencies, too," he says. "Obama put this in motion, but now many senators and members of Congress are using Twitter to communicate. Sarah Palin, for example, is using it to combat the media."

The GAO committee held the first meeting in June, with the second scheduled later this month. Young says Gene L. Dodaro, acting comptroller general of the United States and head of the GAO, is heading efforts to get information to people in the way they consume it.