The Air Force and the NY Israeli Consulate Use Twitter to Spread Their Messages

Thanks to Twitter I knew about the blog post by David Meerman Scott (@dmscott) titled ”The US Air Force: Armed with social media.” The post couldn’t have come at a better time as I’d been contemplating an online project that shall be revealed in due time.

The gist of Scott’s blog post is that, because he found the Air Force on Twitter as @AFPAA, Scott spoke about this effort to Captain David Faggard, Chief of Emerging Technology at the Air Force Public Affairs Agency in the Pentagon. Scott wrote that Faggard explained that the Air Force’s “mission is to use current and developing Web 2.0 applications as a way to actively engage conversations between Airmen and the general public.”

Scott is particularly impressed by the Air Force’s efforts because, as he says, “the Air Force is doing so much while many in the private sector are still doing so little.”

And I am equally impressed with the Air Force’s efforts as well as other emerging uses of Web 2.0.

This week Benjamin Netanyahu went on YouTube (see above) to explain the U.S. position of retaliating against attacks from Gaza. And the New York Israeli Consulate (@IsraelConsulate) held a “press conference” on Twitter on the same topic.

What’s a press conference on Twitter? It’s a way to bypass the often-biased media channels and take the info straight to the people. Twitter users asked questions in 140 characters and got answers in 140 characters. And afterwards these conversations were “enlarged” from Twitter language (for example, changing 4 to for) and put on the consulate’s blog.

Without spilling the beans too soon, I’ll say that on Wednesday afternoon I registered a domain name for my proposed experiment of using the new media and the new technology to undertake a project that I believe I can’t successfully undertake using traditional methods. I’m hoping that, by using a technique called “inbound marketing,” I can achieve my goals.

Only time will tell whether my experiment will succeed -- I’ll announce the launch here when the project’s ready to go.