so this is mass communication?

The U.S. Navy announced a special social network targeted to service members on deployment.

Anyone reading this blog would probably agree that social media tools represent some of the best ways to stay connected when away from loved ones, whether it be through a blog post to broadcast to your family what you’re doing or a flickr upload of pictures from your latest adventures.

But these “travel-logues” for forward-deployed service members can just as easily be accessed by adversaries. That means information from these updates can be pieced together with other open-source intelligence to possibly hurt the very forces and causes these service members are protecting. It may seem as harmless as posting a pic, but what you’re really doing is broadcasting your unit’s exact location by showing the surroundings.

They used to say “loose lips sink ships.”

Today we have so many more lips moving in much more publicly broadcast ways that this can potentially be a real problem. My psychology colleague at UGA, Dr. Janet Frick, updated this concept a bit, keeping with the rhyming action:

Loose tweets sink fleets.

Cute, isn’t it?

But back to this social network the Navy announced.

The site offers families of deployed Sailors & Marines a personalized family Web site:

• hosted in a safe & secure environment
• includes 2 hours of streaming video
• unlimited photo albums
• interactive calendars and message boards
• contact list which is really an address book (great for knowing who to send postcards to!)
• used by more than 1,200 families now and is FREE for the family

Yep, acts much like a compilation of all the popular social networks out there.

Check out this sample demo site they have for the “Stuart Family.” Being a big fan of my own sister’s blog for her million kids in Kansas (wouldn’t you just love a link to that one!), I especially loved the little girl’s rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

As the release mentions, many of the social networking sites out there are blocked by military servers … so the Facebooks, MySpaces, YouTubes & Flickrs of the world are not an option for keeping in touch. With the restrictions on file sizes for e-mail, it is also hard to send good photos & nearly impossible to get video through.

This seems like a great service & I can tell you that nothing has a more positive impact than good communication with the homefront when deployed.

I’d be more interested to see their terms of service written in a less legal & more understandable way. Things that I’m not even sure about after reading their terms are whether the content uploaded is still owned by the families (not a company) & can also be posted on other sites by the family, whether there is a screening process to protect operational security, etc. One thing that does suck, which I found in the FAQ, is that the site apparetnly goes away for the family after 12 months. What happens to the family content, I’m not really sure.

But all in all, it seems like a great public-private collaboration helping keep families connected through deployments.

And heck, if you have a few bucks laying around, you might want to sponsor a family.

Disclosure for those who didn’t know: I am a commissioned Reserve public affairs officer in the U.S. Navy. Still, they don’t pay me enough to do their PR on my own time I wrote this of my own will without influence.

As someone who has written and integrated several social media plans for government public affairs, this is a topic near & dear to me. Colin McKay over at So Said the Organization just posted about a blogger outreach code for government.

He lists some good rules of the road.

I don’t, however, think government public affairs needs a different code of conduct than civilian public relations. I think the WOMMA code is just about as good as it gets — the problem here is getting people to operate within these guidelines.

So why don’t practitioners follow the rules?

I think part of it is just not realizing that there ARE rules of the road. I think some organizations are so lost when it comes to social media, that they think they can just pop right in without really taking the time to understand the community.

Is it their fault for not taking the time to do their homework before jumping in or is it OUR fault as practitioners immersed & well-versed in social media for not educating the industry?

You tell me.

PS - Kevin at Bad Pitch Blog has a great “quiz” to take for practitioners to determine if you’re ready to start engaging bloggers.

This article is a few weeks old (from the March 5 issue of Navy Times), but since it isn’t showing up on search engines I imagine most people haven’t seen it.

Several months ago, some people at my Navy command in Bahrain sent me a few of the YouTube videos from the VAW 116 “Sun Kings”on YouTube. These guys were doing what a lot of folks do on YouTube - take a song, make a video. Only these guys were cool Navy pilots. Underway. On an aircraft carrier. Totally cool.

But probably not what “big Navy” wanted as the face of Navy operations, I suspect.

I don’t know for sure what the D.C.-based Chief of Naval Information (CHINFO) reaction was, but I imagine they were a little freaked out as many organizations are when they first see their employees’ videos on YouTube.

In some cases, PR people should freak out. People like Lockheed Martin, for example. But to me, videos like this from Sailors underway having a good time while serving their country is more of a (social media) commercial for an organization than anything else.

So no, I don’t have any insight into the Pentagon reaction - but I hope that my Navy was smart enough to look past these guys making fools of themselves & realize the positive impact it could have on a target audience of possible young recruits.

For those  of you without a Navy Times login, here is the article …

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