Here's a new guide to government 2.0, designed to offer success strategies for applying proven social networking principles within the government and military, just in time for the Open Government and Innovations taking place next week.
Social media and networking web sites, along with successful social learning communities, provide powerful examples of the principles that government and the military can apply to their social learning programs. Principle #5 is outlined below:
Principle #5: Nurture Content Addiction
Successful sites are those active enough to maintain the attention of even the busiest people. Novelty and change are one big reason for people to keep coming back. The ongoing success of FaceBook and Twitter illustrate how "content addiction" creates a reason for visitors to continually engage with the site.
From an enterprise perspective, this "content addiction" can be achieved by applying the practice of content aggregation across the social learning community. Aggregating content across all topics and areas provides pulse on the project, or even the entire organization. Social filters are key to making this information meaningful to users. A good public example of this Digg.com.
Personalized aggregation, which continues to grow in popularity, is another important strategy where users collect all the feeds from topics or colleagues to see in one location. This Facebook or Twitter style aggregation when applied within the government provides a broad view introducing users to new information, while the personalized view trims down the information. An important piece of content production is revealing both implicit content [content as revealed user activity such as ‘Ted marked document X as helpful'] and explicit content [content that is added by typing].