How the U.S. Army is Using Social Media

One of the most interesting aspects of web technology and social media nowadays is how it's being deployed by non-techies.

Recently I had the chance to connect with the U.S. Army to find out how it is using the Web.
Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, online video and more is currently in operation at U.S. Army HQ. I spoke to Suzanne Nagel, Digital Chief Accessons Command of the U.S. Army, who walked me through how the Web is being used for recruitment and community.

We started off by discussing a blog called Army Strong Stories, which enables people to hear authentic stories from U.S. Army soldiers. A word from our sponsor: A word from our sponsor: NoSQL Now! is a new conference covering the dynamic field of NoSQL technologies, scheduled for the San Jose Convention Center, in San Jose, California, on August 23-25, 2011.

It is a vendor-neutral forum describing the diversity of NoSQL technologies and helping businesses develop objective evaluation processes to match the right NoSQL solutions with the right business challenge. Keynote speakers include Dwight Merriman, architect of MongoDB, and Mike Stonebraker, database pioneer and serial entrepreneur.Ad powered by BTBuckets Launched in 2008, the target audience of Army Strong Stories is the U.S. Army's primary recruiting target: men aged 18-24. This age group spends a lot of time online, so a blog was seen as an effective way to reach that audience. The site also reaches women in the same age group, but Nagel explained that about 80% of jobs in the U.S. Army aren't open to women (I didn't realize it was that high a number).

Real Army Stories The idea behind Army Strong Stories is to interact with the target audience and enable them to read and hear stories about army life. Soldiers are encouraged to engage with the readers, by replying to comments. The aim is to build a dialog with potential recruits, partly to disavow them of myths about army life - for example, said Nagel, the scream-in-your-face drill sergeant so often portrayed in Hollywood movies. Army Strong Stories features blog posts about anything related to army life.

It's not necessarily career based content (see the tag cloud to the right for a list of topics). I asked Suzanne Nagel whether the bloggers write about politics. She replied that generally no, however the army doesn't censor or filter content - other than for bad language. Video is a relatively new part of the site, generally featuring army staff speaking for a couple of minutes about their lives.

Army Strong Stories isn't the army's main web presence. Goarmy.com is the main recruiting website, which is used for recruiting soldiers and presenting facts about the army.

Usage so far of Army Strong Stories has been broad, said Nagel. She noted that it's not just men 18-24 who frequent the site. Regulars include bloggers' parents and other relatives. Army Social Media Of course in this day and age, it isn't all about the blog. The army uses Facebook and Twitter a lot.

It also has both an iPhone app and a mobile website, featuring the same functionality as the website. They are currently working on an iPad version and will "probably" work on an Android version in the future. Overall, the U.S. army is actively growing its digital efforts. In particular, and in common with many other organizations, over the past 5 years it has increasingly used social media.