The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) is doing some fun experimentation posting its videos on YouTube. Now, everyone and their cousin has posted videos on YouTube, right? (See this team competition from our Forum One 2006 retreat.) But for a government agency, posting content on such public social media sites is navigating in uncharted waters.

Joe Flood of NOAA's Ocean Explorer program wrote about NOAA's experiences in using YouTube, in comments he shared with a Federal web managers mailing list, and he agreed to let me post his remarks on this blog.

What I think are some key takeways:
-These videos are just an amazing way to get people excited about the very cool work and the mission of NOAA.
-Social media policy for the Federal government? It's a real gray area (opportunity, right?!)
-Pilot project: they started it as a pilot, and built support and the comfort-level in their program before launching it formally.
-Why YouTube? Ocean Explorer already has a great web site with lots of video, so why bother with YouTube? The answer is eyeballs: i.e. 27,000 views in the month of March.
-Interactivity: for the videos they posted on their YouTube channel, they they turned off the "comment" feature to avoid what would probably be a lot of messy issues. Too bad - but probably a pragmatic first effort.
-YouTube tools! YouTube has some great tools for creating your own channels, "guru" accounts, etc.


Here's Joe's note:

"I think a lot of government web sites are wrestling with these (online social media) issues, since advances in technology have outstripped policies which were created long before the advent of social media. I can share with you the process we went through on Ocean Explorer (http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov), the site that I manage, when we first started looking into YouTube.

"The mission of Ocean Explorer is to chronicle underwater exploration efforts funded by NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration. Staff at sea send us daily logs, photos - and short videos. Adding these videos to YouTube made a lot of sense to us, because we could reach a larger audience than we could just through our site. Plus, since most of our videos are in the public domain, several of them had already been uploaded to YouTube by the general public.

"We first decided to try YouTube out ourselves as a pilot project. We created a channel at http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=oceanexplorergov and populated it with several of our videos. The objective of this pilot was to familiarize ourselves with the community and how it worked. Also, we wanted to see how much use our channel would get - was this worth our time? After a month, we decided that it definitely was. Our channel got a great deal of traffic (we have some really cool videos) and YouTube was very easy to use.

"Our next step was to get buy-in from the program that we work for, the Office of Ocean Exploration. We conducted a "YouTube Summit" during which we hashed out all the issues related to having our videos on YouTube. Prior to the meeting, I had the participants in the meeting create user accounts on YouTube. I sent them a homework assignment, asking them to bookmark videos, add comments to a video, subscribe to a channel, etc... The purpose of this homework was to get people to understand how YouTube worked and get them comfortable with it.

"During our "YouTube Summit" we literally clicked through all the sections of our YouTube channel and talked about what we were comfortable with, what we weren't, and what could be a problem. The result was not official policy but rather a set of Operating Principles for how we would operate the channel:

"Access: we would make as many of our videos available on YouTube as possible because it fits in with our mission to inform the public.

"Comments: we turned off the ability to comment on our videos. If people post inappropriate comments and we delete them, we could be accused of censorship. (This was a tough one but social media brings up a lot of issues and requires some compromise.)

"Security: we follow our department's security regulations.

"Privacy: we don't collect users personal information so there were no privacy issues.

"Branding: we're going to add the Ocean Explorer URL to the end of our videos, so people know where they come from.

"Reporting: we'll report monthly stats on how the channel is doing.

"We've had a good amount of success in YouTube. In March, our videos were viewed more than 27,000 times. I think the biggest battle is getting people familiar with how these services operate. Once people use them, the sense of fear and distrust tends to go away. My overall advice would be to involve the program you work for and get them to understand how social media works. IMHO, there's no denying that social media is the direction the web is going in, it's what the public wants, and therefore gov't web sites should respond.

-Joe"

Joe Flood
NOAA Ocean Explorer


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