I continue to be impressed with the way the US Department of Defense (DoDis handling staff use of social media. As most organizations continue to succumb to the FUD factor by blocking employee access, the DoD recognizes the importance of online engagement by staff at all levels—from Pentagon workers to soldiers in the field.

If ever an organization was security-conscious, it’s the DoD. Yet they’ve managed to address security concerns while trusting hundreds of thousands of members of the organization to represent the DoD well in social forums.

A Social Media Hub has been added to the DoD’s arsenal of social media tools—another approach from which mainstream business can learn. While the DoD hub is accessible to the general public, it would be equally easy to create something like this on a corporate intranet as a resource for employees.

The home page of the hub proclaims, “social media is an integral part of Department of Defense operations. This site is designed to help the DoD community use social media and other internet-based capabilities to share responsibly and effectively, both in official and unofficial capacities.”

The site offers three core categories of information:

• Learning and Resources—“I’m concerned about social media and I need…” reads the introduction to this section, which leads to education and training resources, social media guides and examples.
• Policies and Procedures—This section begins with “I manage an official DoD social media presence and I want to…” which directs visitors to policies, user agreements and a form to register a page with the DoD.
• Collaborate and Connect—“I have questions about social media,” reads the introduction to this section, “and I want to…” Visitors can access discussion forums, FAQs and an Ask the Experts section (a contact form).

The page includes many of the elements more commonly seen on inidividuals’ social media channels, like retweet and Facebook share buttons. The site walks the talk in other ways, such as the embedding of SlideShare presentations in the Examples section.

Access to resources like this can reinforce policies and training and raise the confidence of employees who know they have somewhere to go where they can not only review the rules but ask questions, view case studies and have conversations with others in the organization.

Once again, I’m left wondering: Why can a command and control-centric organization like the US military take such a rational approach to social media while the average US corporation behaves more like we’d expect the military to behave?