Engaging Online, Military Style
Institutionally speaking, the Israel Defense Forces had stumbled into a major social media role during the 3 week operation against Gaza in 2008-2009 when a few soldiers and I had taken it upon ourselves to open an IDF YouTube Channel. The YouTube channel had garnered millions of views (partly as a result of the controversy where we were shut down and then quickly reopened).
From the IDF's perspective this foray into the realm of social media was an ill conceived liability. That being said, there was a high level understanding that the jinni was out of the bottle and that, once opened, the IDF social media platforms could not be closed down.
Unfortunately, at least for the first several years, the IDF Spokesperson's Unit didn't quite grasp the "social" part of "social media". Comments on Youtube, the blog and Flickr were disabled and in order to respond to questions, @IDFspokesperson had to go up three layers in the chain of command to get approval to tweet.
There were two major mental hurdles that needed to be overcome before the policy could be changed: first, the mental lens whereby social media platforms were viewed as simply another broadcasting channel. In interactive digital age, it wasn't enough to dump our material online and call it a day - rather than talking at people, we needed to engage with them. The second, and more challenging was embracing the chaos, recognizing that once we released videos, pictures, and information online, we would no longer have full control over how people re-used it. This was a major change, since at least with traditional media outlets you could appeal to the journalist or editor, whereas that was simply impossible when dealing with the online masses.
It took many years, several serious missteps, and the pervasive penetration of interactive media into our daily lives, but the IDF has really begun to embrace the importance of the social/engagement component. To the point where rather than heaps of criticism for being non-responsive, they get praise for their innovative social media approach.
Appropriately, for Holocaust Memorial Day, they launched a Twitter Campaign, #WeAreHere, which encouraged followers followers from around the world to tweet pictures of themselves with their relatives who are holocaust survivors. The pictures and tweets were then turned into an interactive global map. This is an excellent example of a focused, topic specific, and engaging social media campaign with a clear call to action that generates a sense of common belonging and sense of reward for participants.