• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer, December 2, 2011

The federal government is much in the news nowadays, and the scrutiny now extends to its social media savvy, or lack thereof, courtesy of Expert Labs, which has created a Federal Social Media Index to track and rate 125 federal departments on their social media efforts using Twitter. In addition to a comprehensive interactive dashboard measuring each department’s Twitter use, including key measures of engagement like the number of questions responded to, each week Expert Labs will crown the best agency use of social media -- and presumably call out the losers too.

And there is a wide range of social media skill on display by these different federal departments, from rock star to rudimentary. Expert Labs explains: “While it's obvious the federal government’s embraced social media on Twitter and Facebook, each organization uses them in different ways and it's tricky to tell who's doing it well. Some use it for press releases alone, while others are soliciting opinions from the public and replying constantly. Our hope is that the FSMI helps bring the people behind these accounts together, helping them learn from each other's efforts, as well as informing any future agencies getting ready to make the plunge.”

In its first week of operations, the most-answered tweet from a federal agency came from the U.S. Marine Corps, @USMC: “Happy Thanksgiving #Marines and family. If you could only have a #MRE which one would you have today? Now go PT before dinner” (MRE refers to a Meal Ready to Eat, the not-quite-haute-cuisine field rations distributed to U.S. military personnel in combat zones and other places where real cooks aren’t available).

As noted in a previous post, in 2009 the Obama administration paved the way for federal agencies to make wider use of social media to interact with the public. The Office of Management and Budget waived cumbersome paperwork requirements for public communications in accord with the Open Government Directive issued by the White House on December 8, 2009. The waiver specifically exempts Web-based interactive technologies that enable “unstructured” feedback from the public -- a category that includes visitor comments on Web pages, as well as online initiatives from Federal agencies using sites like Facebook, Twitter, and so on.