Social Media and National Defense

Gautham Nagesh reports:

Wired's Danger Room blog has a preview of a study from the National Defense University titled "Social Software and National Security." The paper, written by NDU scientist Mark Drapeau and former Pentagon CIO Lin Wells, is expected to be released early next week, but Noah Shactman has an excerpt posted that looks fairly interesting.

The excerpt describes the four broad functions of social media in the government: inward sharing of information within agencies; outward sharing of internal agency information with other governmental entities; inbound sharing, which allows the government to obtain input from the public more easily; and outbound sharing, whose purpose is to communicate with stakeholders outside the government.

Shactman writes that the report is a good summary for those unfamiliar with social media, but may seem a bit obvious to veteran users of tools like Twitter and Facebook.