U.S. Army Social and Mobile – Victories and Challenges

A discussion with Major Juanita Chang, U.S. Army Director, Online and Social Media Division, Office of the Chief of Public Affairs, and Matt MacLaughlin from SCoE Mobile, where the Army developed its new official social media handbook iPhone app. Major Chang discusses a number of developments for Army social media, as well as challenges, including: The Army just produced its 17th "weekly social media roundup. "We realize that most Army public affairs offices cannot dedicate one person to social media, so we do all the homework for them and send them a weekly roll up of what they need to know and some latest lessons/pointers/case studies, etc.," says Chang. The roundups are posted on on the Army's official Slideshare page; Integration of the Facebook "like" button on Army.mil stories has dramatically increased traffic to the website; Chang will discuss the atypical challenges Army faces in social media, including enforcing operational security features that the average citizen does not worry about, such as the dangers of geo-tagging photos, and educating friends and family members of these security issues; The Army is working closely with Facebook to combat two impersonation challenges: fake profiles that are being set up for very senior Army leaders, and fake profiles pretending to by soldiers to scam women out of money; Army UStreamed its first live event two weeks ago from a conference center in Florida; As of April 29, 2010, Army had 28,429 Twitter followers and 236,748 Facebook fans, Chang says. "Today, we have 58,560 Twitter followers and 636,536 followers on Facebook."