Thank you, Arria, for these potentially revolutionary developments!
This past semester, I've been a student in a graduate course on the rhetoric of social media. Each of us was tasked with choosing an online community to participate in and use as a case study. As many of you know, I chose the CDS, and my work's grown into an eventual paper and dissertation chapter on political rhetoric in the CDS.
Early on, my professor asked a question which baffled both of us: Why doesn't the CDS use social media? I've asked a number of people and received a range of answers. I think they fall into two categories: the CDS establishment is deeply conservative (if we lived without it in 2004, what do we need those newfangled contraptions for anyway?) and, fundamentally, not interested in talking to outsiders.
Social media tools have some value for internal communications: my small World of Warcraft guild uses Facebook to plan events because the tools are good and everybody's already there. They're not very useful for a small, insular SL community, whose active members don't make much use of them personally - inworld tools are better for reaching people in SL. As the name says, these are *social* media tools - they're used for making contacts, building networks, finding people and linking them. Marketing, in other words.
These are powerful tools, and the CDS absolutely should be using them. Arria's gotten off to a good start with Facebook.
But as with any tool (and I know, I say this over and over again, but it's *important*), the point of it isn't "look, we have this tool!" It's using the tool to do the job it's best designed for, to get the results it's intended to get. This is true of Twitter, of plebiscites, of legislatures. They're all tools for particular circumstances, to achieve particular ends, and not just to be used because you like them, on not used because they're new.
I would *love* to see the next Chancellor and PIO develop and present a social media strategy, and then implement it. Marketing, public communications, outreach, networking - this is an *essential* function of SL community management, and one gone shamefully undone until Arria set up these channels.
Plenty of other communities in SL make active, effective use of blogs, wikis, Twitter, RSS feeds, Facebook, Plurk and other collaborative tools. It's pretty easy to determine what best practices are and to implement them. I know the marketing directors for a number of organizations in SL, and would be happy to arrange meetings or a "social media for noobs" workshop for anyone interested in learning how to use these tools effectively.
It's time consuming work, as Arria's learned: implementing an effective social media strategy for an SL community takes 5-20 hours a week. It's definitely best to have a staff to spread that burden around.
But it's worth doing. Turning outward, joining the grid and the wider internet, will end the CDS's insularity and stagnation. This needs doing, and it should be the *top* priority for everyone in the government in the next term. It will certainly be mine, as an official or as a volunteer.
