At a time when Facebook has 500 million users and Twitter is closing in on 200 million, the Pentagon no longer has a single person guiding its communications shop on how to use social media to get the military’s message out.
Gone are communication pro Price Floyd and technology exec Sumit Agarwal, the two men brought in during the past two years to get the Pentagon comfortable with online interaction in the 21st century. Floyd, a relentless tweeter, decamped in August to join defense giant BAE Systems.
Agarwal, a former Google manager, now works on cybersecurity issues in the Pentagon policy directorate. Their old boss, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs Douglas Wilson, decided not to replace Agarwal, who left in November.
Instead, now that the Facebook pages and Twitter feeds they set up are in place, Wilson says using social media ought to be the responsibility of the approximately 100 people he oversees. “I was increasingly concerned our approach to social media was a stovepiped professional area,” he tells Danger Room.
“It’s important for people in press operations, community and public outreach and communications and planning to be able to know how to use and access Facebook, Twitter and the other social media tools, rather than just have a single unit or single person do nothing but social media.”
Time will tell if Pentagon Social Media 2.0 is an actual upgrade. For one thing, it doesn’t make policy on servicemembers’ access to YouTube or Facebook, — a deeply controversial topic in certain military circles.
The Pentagon’s shockingly open social-media guidelines expire on March 1st.
Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn is in charge of deciding whether a soldier in Afghanistan should be allowed to tweet freely over military networks. He’s also one of the officials sounding the alarm about the Pentagon’s need to secure its networks.
Given the new mindfulness in the post-WikiLeaks Pentagon about the downside of online communications tools, it’s worth wondering how the Pentagon will strike the new balance without an active social-media point person arguing for openness.
Wilson denies that social media will be placed on the back burner. Rather, he says, it’s the new normal inside his communications shop. “Our people are being trained in how best to use [social media], apply it to their day-to-day work, beyond sending personal Twitter messages or being on Facebook on their own,” Wilson says. From there, they advise the military services on how to interact with their followers and Facebook fans.
That is, if the services ask the Pentagon for help: They tend to have bigger online presences than the Pentagon.
Some of the ways that Wilson’s people adapt social media to their workaday responsibilities are more reactive than interactive. Harold Hielsnis, who runs the Public Affairs Research and Analysis office, says that he now trolls Twitter, Facebook and Google’s blog search to figure out what people interested in defense are saying about it. But if others working for Wilson are engaging with the defense community, Hielsnis isn’t one of them: He’s not on either Twitter or Facebook. It’s up to the press shop to figure out whether and how they want to use his social-media-informed research.
And don’t expect to see an explosion in Pentagon tweeters with handles like @DODJohnny. A single staffer, whom Hielsnis declined to identify, maintains the Department’s Facebook page and Twitter feed, so the department speaks in a single virtual voice. “We are a centralized organization and we work in that way,” he says.
But it needs to be said that whoever is in charge of those accounts is familiar with all internet traditions. Both are filled with material that engages with people’s concerns about the military, as with this tweet today directing @AZBoojum to a feed where he could get information on traumatic brain injury. TheDefense Department’s Facebook wall is a defense-community sounding board, and the page itself acts as a portal to all things military. Personally, I wouldn’t have known that the military was extending the time it was taking for troops to recoup any extra stop-loss pay if it weren’t for the Pentagon’s social-media outreach.
That might be why Floyd isn’t sweating the lack of a social media chief. “The policy is in place,” he emails from the U.K., “no need to have a champion since it is being implemented literally everywhere.”
There are some mixed signals, though. With the exception of longtime social media maven Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, it’s been months since the Pentagon’s blogger roundtables (which this blog engages in, and did so as recently as this morning) featured a prominent general or flag officer
Wilson says social media is now a part of his shop’s muscle memory, something that should come naturally given that it’s hard to find professionals in the D.C. area who aren’t using some form of social media. (Hell, even Donald Rumsfeld is.) “There are a lot of people in here who do their own personal little Twitter accounts,” he says — before conceding, “I don’t.”
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