The official place to post federal job openings is usajobs.gov.

But we’re also allowed to post them on other online job sites. I’m guessing we’ll simply describe the jobs in plain language and then link to the usajobs listing.

So I’m looking for suggestions. Whatcha know?

Especially helpful would be links to articles or other lists where people rate the sites for # of users, ease of use, etc.

I’ll keep adding to the list below as people submit them via comments.

Thanks!

Sites I already know of:

• monster.com
• hotjobs.com
• indeed.com
• theladders.com

I started using Facebook and Twitter as professional experiments. I needed to know about these sites to decide whether and how EPA should use them. I also had a LinkedIn account that sat unused for years, and I joined GovLoop. Along the way, I set up accounts on Slideshare and Scribd to share my presentations and EPA’s blogging guidance.

But Facebook, Twitter and GovLoop are where I spend my time, and I’ve settled into a distinct pattern: Facebook is personal and the others are professional.

When I say I use Facebook for personal purposes, I don’t mean I include only non-work people. In fact, most of my friends there are from work, whether at EPA or not. But I use it mostly for sharing non-work stuff: my photos, funny stuff, etc. I’m pretty happy with how I choose friends there, too. I recently reviewed the couple hundred friends there, and I deleted very few. I do get a steady stream of Facebook friend invites from people I’ve met in various ways. I respond politely to ask whether we know each other, explaining I use that site to stay in touch with real-life friends. I also tell people I accept all friend requests at GovLoop.

Twitter, to me, is an extremely valuable professional networking tool. The people I follow help me filter the flood of relevant info, help me think through problems, and share their own ideas in a way that’s very easy for me to absorb as I have time. That’s why I don’t follow back everyone who follows me. There’s no reason that people who might be interested in my musings on gov’t and social media necessarily talk about that topic themselves. I also know there are loads of people who do, but I don’t spend much time looking. I can’t keep up with the people I do follow. But if you talk to me using an @ reply, I usually respond.

GovLoop is really an amazing resource. I wish I had more time to spend. The percentage of stuff that’s relevant to me is very high, whether it’s as a federal gov’t web manager, a federal employee in general, someone committed to gov 2.0, or just a social media user. Since it’s all professional, and I can’t think of any reason not to, I accept all friend requests there.

LinkedIn is a special case. I believe in LinkedIn’s original premise: personal contacts. I don’t mean to be rude or mean if I reject a connection request from someone I don’t know. And I know many people use it as a massive networking tool. But I don’t use it as a general contact file. I actually barely use it, which makes it more important to me that I connect only with people I genuinely know and could say something about.

Why am I telling you this? Because I think my usage pattern is just one of many, and I want to make the point that there’s no single right way of doing it. But I also think we’re all entitled to use these tools as we see fit. I’ve had people tell me it’s wrong to reject a LinkedIn request or a FB friend request. I’m sorry, but I respectfully disagree.

BTW: this blog is another example of where we have to use the tools as appropriate. I realized recently I hadn’t found time to write anything substantial in several weeks. But that just reflects how busy I’ve been. I’m sure I’ll pick up the pace again at some point.

Anyway, how do YOU use the tools, and the opportunities they create? Maybe I’m missing something!

Go read this post by Steve Radick: Gov 2.0 – We Need to Get Past the Honeymoon Stage of Our Relationship

Be sure to read every link he provides, too.  In particular, read this bit of strategic thinking from Chris Brogan and this concept for an event focusing on the Shortfalls of Government 2.0.

And then join the conversation in the comments on Steve’s post.

I’d like to invite you to check out a few of the ways we’re using social media here at EPA. This isn’t all of it, and our uses are expanding rapidly, but it’s a good start.

I’m also not getting into great detail about whether I think each effort is successful – that’s not my point here.  Rather, I just want to share some of it so you can see what we’re up to and consider for yourself whether it seems to work, whether it would work for your agency, etc.

http://blog.epa.gov – our blog, Greenversations. My presentation about how we run it, our goals, etc. is here: http://www.slideshare.net/levyj413/from-30000-feet-to-3-feet-running-a-federal-blog

In particular, you might be interested to see how we ask a weekly non-policy question (http://blog.epa.gov/blog/category/question-of-the-week/)

http://blog.epa.gov/enforcementnationalpriority – our policy discussion forum built on our blog server. This is where we invited input on how we should prioritize our enforcement office’s efforts for the next three years. The questions all got pretty good response, but this one got 72! http://blog.epa.gov/enforcementnationalpriority/suggestions1/

http://epa.gov/pick5 – Pick 5 for the Environment. This is the project where we invite people to choose 5 of 10 environmental actions and commit to them. We’ve also set up a Facebook fan page, a Flickr group, a YouTube group, and a Twitter hashtag, all accessible from the page. This is a good example of “fail fast.” We did it very lightweight to start with, and discovered it didn’t go viral. Now we’re examining what we can do to engage people more. One way is that we’re posting to our blog every two weeks, along with sending an email to the 14,000 people on the Pick 5 mailing list, inviting them to share their stories. Each post is about one of the 10 actions. The latest one just went live today, but we got 70 responses to the first one. The whole series is here: http://blog.epa.gov/blog/category/pick5/

http://epa.gov/earthday – our Earth Day page. On the right side, you can find links to our daily environmental tip podcast (published daily during last April), the photo and video projects,and the daily env. tip widget. At the top, you’ll see a random banner each time you reload. Most of the pictures were finalists from our 2008 Earth Day photo contest, and you’ll see we give them credit in the photos.

http://epa.gov/widgets – our widgets. We currently are working to bring them all into a common look and feel and include a “share” button.

http://facebook.com/epa – our main Facebook fan page.

http://www.epa.gov/radon/videocontest.html – our radon video contest. Watch the winner! It cost us $2500 in prize money, but was worth every penny. One thing to consider with video contests is how many people each entry affects. It’s not just the folks who make the video who get engaged, but everyone they show it to. Thinking just of myself, I’d bet everyone who entered shared their video with everyone they knew.

http://youtube.com/usepagov – our YouTube channel.

http://www.epa.gov/ – our home page, where you can see links to social media offerings in the lower right corner.

http://www.epa.gov/epahome/socialmedia.html – Our page describing most of our social media efforts, including links to our Facebook and Twitter accounts

Finally, on most EPA pages, you can see a “share” link in the upper right corner. Click it, and you’ll get the option to share that page’s URL on a variety of social media sites. We coded up our own “bookmarklet” instead of using commercial options for various reasons.

EPA’s site has 400,000 HTML pages.

Guess how many of them (or what %) were viewed more than 100 times in July?

More on this after a while.

@BareKnuckleDawg recently sent me the following concerns regarding government use of social media:

• I regard this “Gov 2.0 thing as the governments way of attempting to spy on the public while “sitting in their lap”, so to speak.
• The government wants to constantly monitor public sentiment – and I think you are all aiming for a degree of control over it.
• I believe the government wants to monitor public sentiment in realtime and have the ability to “shutdown” any user they choose

My response was that nothing I’ve said, and nothing I’ve ever heard, matched these suspicions. I’ve talked to a whole lot of people at a huge range of agencies at every level: federal, state, local, and even other countries. In every case, *every single case*, the discussion centers on ideals of citizen engagement, open government, transparency, etc. But I also acknowledged that it’s possible some agencies will use these tools in that way.  I mean, people can use any tool, online or off, for nefarious purposes.

I suspect there’s no way to convince anyone of what we’ll actually do in advance, so we just need to do it instead.  And in a free society, the best defense is citizens keeping an eye on things.

But I also think this is a wide-open discussion topic, and I’d love to see loads of people share their thinking. To get the ball rolling, here are a few questions to ponder:

1. What’s the “real” reason gov’t agencies want to engage in social media?
2. Is there any way to convince skeptics like @BareKnuckleDawg that they’re wrong, other than just doing it and showing what we’re up to over time?
3. If some agency does use social media the way suggested, how should other agencies, the public, the media, etc. react?

As you discuss, feel free to suggest other questions and I’ll update this main post.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written, you know I favor government agencies using social media to meet their missions. Strongly favor. I see these tools as offering tremendous potential benefits. Yet there are also other considerations at play.

Did you know the Department of Defense runs its own TV station called the Pentagon Channel? I haven’t really explored it, but the point is it exists.

Did you know that the Air Force blocks the Pentagon channel? Yes, that’s right: one of the major military services prevents its members from seeing what the larger organization is broadcasting.

At this point, you’re probably thinking one of two things:

1. The Air Force IT people are idiots, or
2. Someone in the Air Force knows something you don’t know

When I hear of seemingly absurd situations, I try to remember that leaders generally aren’t stupid. Partly, that’s because I’ve made my own decisions that seemed stupid on the surface but reflected knowledge that wasn’t commonly known. Partly, it’s because of my basic faith that most people make thoughtful decisions. Even if I disagree with their conclusions, I try not to assume they’re inane.

So I didn’t appreciate this blog post. The writer was so busy ridiculing Air Force leadership that he didn’t seem to read the explanation he included from a spokeswoman: it’s a bandwidth issue.

Not fear of online video, concern about wasted time, or a desire to quash the use of social media. Nor a too-limited focus on information security, privacy, or any of a hundred other reasons government agencies can be slow to adopt these tools.

Granted, I don’t know what else the spokeswoman said, and I don’t know what else the blogger might have uncovered. Maybe the bandwidth concern is a smokescreen. I’ll probably never know.

But that’s my point. It’s far too easy to snipe from the sidelines. Too many people think they know everything going into these decisions, and that they know better what should be done.

For example, the blogger thought it was important for Air Force personnel to be able to watch a cooking show.  As a taxpayer, I’m wondering why my money is going to pay for the creation of such a show, and why my money should be allocated to provide bandwidth for anyone to watch it.

But I also assume there’s more to that story, and that the decision makers have reasons I’m not aware of.

By all means, the blogger and others should ask those questions.  And government leaders owe the public the answers.

But even as you question, and even if you disagree, don’t assume the people making the decisions are stupid.

In gov’t web management circles, a common assumption is that there isn’t much interest in agency heads.  Rather, people come to us for information or to do things like get their driver’s licenses.  I discuss this idea with my friend Candi Harrison on a regular basis, and she’s blogged about how much she dislikes making a big deal out of agency heads.

I agree with the point that our Web sites should be about primarily about serving citizens. But I’m starting to wonder whether,  in the world of social media, we’re missing an opportunity.

At EPA, we’re trying out a few different approaches on Facebook. Comparing Administrator Lisa P. Jackson’s page to the main EPA Facebook page, we’re getting some good data that suggests the personal approach works really well in this venue.

EPA has 2660 fans. Administrator Jackson has 1391 fans, but is growing faster.

On Facebook, fans can click a button saying they like something and they can also comment.  Let’s look at what happened with a recent post on each page about an op-ed by Administrator Jackson on selling environmentalism.

On the main EPA page, 4 people clicked they liked it and 4 commented.  On the Administrator’s page, 33 clicked they liked it and 20 commented.

This result is typical when we post things to both pages.

My takeaway is that for items focused specifically on Administrator Jackson, her page’s fans react much more.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens as we make efforts to have the main page be more interactive and personal, and as we focus on a few specific topics.

And while we’re looking at personal vs. organizational, here’s a related question: is it possible to have a Facebook fan base heavily engage with a page that covers a broad variety of topics, or is it better to focus it much more narrowly?  I’m guessing the latter is better in terms of measuring engagement.

Stay tuned.

I work at the US Environmental Protection Agency, and we’re trying out some old tools in new ways.

Currently, our enforcement office is using two blogs to post concepts and then taking comments from anyone who wants to join in.

1) Setting environmental enforcement priorities
2) Establishing a plan to improve enforcement of the Clean Water Act

And this is just the beginning. For example, our chief financial officer is going to use the same idea to invite the public to revise our strategic plan. And I know of at least one other program already planning to use a blog the same way.

We’re also avidly exploring how to use social media for formal rulemaking, where the contributions can directly affect regulations.

I’m excited about these developments, and I encourage you to check ‘em out!

You’re invited to join these free webinars that I teach as part of EPA’s Web training program. Please spread the word.

September 2, 2-3 EDT: Mixing Web 1.0 and 2.0. Using our efforts for Earth Month (surrounding Earth Day on April 22), I discuss how we used all of our tools to accomplish our mission. This experience helped me develop my social media mantra: mission, tool, metrics, teach.
Register
View/download the slide deck

September 17, 2:30-4:00 EDT: Talking about social media with managers. I have a presentation I’m giving to senior management groups at EPA. In this webinar, I’ll give the same presentation, but also step out of character to explain what I emphasize as I give it. My goal is to teach you how to give the presentation, and I use the presentation itself as a teaching tool.
Register
View/download the slide deck

For both slide decks, consider them public domain: use them as you see fit, edit them, whatever you like. Crediting me is nice but not required.

Notes:
- When you register, you’ll get a confirmation email with a URL and a phone number. They’re unique to you, so keep that information! If you lose the info, you can just reregister, even after the session starts. There’s no general URL or phone I can give you.
- The only cost is for the call – it’s not toll-free.
- You’ll need to be able to use free software called GotoWebinar, which doesn’t require a separate download – your browser will automatically download a small piece as you start up. It does work with both IE and Firefox.
- I can’t provide technical support. If you’re not sure whether you can access GotoWebinar, or you need help using it, please try their support site.
- I’m willing to record them, but the recordings are enormous and longer than YouTube allows. If you know of a way to distribute a 30-60 minute video that’s hundreds of megabytes, please let me know!
- I do these a few times a year, so you’ll have another chance in a few months if you miss it.