The Buzz Bin

A guest blog entry by John Kamensky, Senior Fellow

IBM Center for The Business of Government

A few weeks ago, the organization where I work, the IBM Center for The Business of Government, released a report on blogging in government, and sponsored an event where we invited both corporate and government bloggers to share their experiences. The audience – largely federal government communication specialists — was wowed by the possibilities for increased citizen and employee participation.

The report, by Dr. David Wyld of Southeastern Louisiana University, seems to be the first overview of the state of the practice. It has over 400 hotlinks to government blogs. He purposely left out political campaign blogs; he wanted to inventory those being used in the administration of government.

Most of the blogs listed in his report were posted by elected officials – governors, mayors, legislators. But he also found blogs by appointed officials — police chiefs, fire chiefs, etc. Less frequent were blogs by federal agencies. In fact, www.USA.gov — the federal government’s central web portal — lists less than a dozen active federal blogs that reach out to the public. But the audience at our event suggests there’s a strong interest — if they can figure out how to overcome bureaucratic hurdles to starting them.

The corporate bloggers at the event ? John Wolf from Marriott Corporation and David Berger from IBM ? described how their companies went about creating their blogs, and how they are used for either external or internal audiences. They spoke directly to the initial fears of their executives about blogging, and described how they convinced their corporate leaders, including their legal departments, to permit blogs.

One federal blog that Dr. Wyld showcases in his report (and who was a speaker at our event) is by the commanding general of the U.S. Strategic Command. General James Cartwright uses an internal, classified blog, and other on-line social networking tools, to move information and ideas more quickly across his command. He says the traditional hierarchy doesn’t work well when decisions need to be made more rapidly than in the past: When al Qaeda can outmaneuver you using Yahoo, we’ve got something wrong here. He sees internal blogging as a leadership imperative in a fast-moving world — the chain of information is different than the chain of command.

I’m new to blogging. I started a few months ago when the IBM Center started a blog on management challenges that will face the next President — inspired in part by Wyld’s report for us. So I’m still learning and amazed at what I?m seeing. Our Blog event was a success, and people seem to be downloading copies of the report like crazy. But I never really understood the power of blogging until I started looking at how the word was getting out about the Blog report. We didn’t get much traditional press. But, boy, it was picked up by the blogosphere and passed along virally. A week after the event, I went onto the Google Blog search engine and found more than a dozen links to the report by different bloggers, all encouraging their readers to read it. A month after the report was released, we’ve had 3,800 visitors read it! So I’m now sold on blogging as a way to both share and learn.

Let’s hope more federal agency officials get on the bandwagon in the near future. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see agency heads or senior officials engage? I bet if the heads of IRS, NASA, FBI, or CDC started a blog, that people would read it!

In the meanwhile — do you know of any federal agency-run blogs – internal or external?