Social Media and the U.S.

Coast Guard
Right Tool ... Right Level … Right Audience

Purpose

Over the past several years, the Coast Guard has been engaged in a social media experiment. As
an early adopter of social media tools, the service has seen the social media landscape evolve
from one initially dominated by MySpace, revolutionized by blogs and bloggers, and
subsequently transformed by Facebook. During this time, best practices have emerged and this
document is aimed at articulating a strategy that will allow the Coast Guard to adapt its social
media program accordingly.

“My command team Strategy

will embrace the use of
social media. Our plan
is to take a centralized, The Commandant of the Coast Guard’s vision for social media will
focused approach to guide our strategy. Our social media program will complement our
social media …” media relations efforts as part of a comprehensive communications plan
– Admiral Bob Papp to educate and engage our publics. And, we will utilize best practices to
deploy the right tool at the right level for the right audience.

To best position the service to take advantage of current trends in online communication and
complement the rest of our public affairs efforts, we are adopting a Right Tool … Right Level …
Right Audience approach to guide our use of social media.

The emergence of Facebook as the dominant social media-networking site is fortuitous as it

affords us the opportunity to communicate our message in words, pictures and video to target
audiences we might not otherwise reach through traditional media outlets. As our stories progress
from the unit to national level, we will incorporate the rest of our social media toolkit both to
maximize our exposure and to most efficiently allocate our public affairs resources.
Operationalizing the Social Media Toolkit

Unit Level Social Media Strategy: All Coast Guard units will have the opportunity to establish
and maintain a Facebook page. A Facebook presence will allow the unit to establish a direct link
to the local community and the families of service members. Unit commanders and public affairs
officers will also engage directly with district level public affairs staff to ensure appropriate
adaptation of unit level stories, images, and video for use on district and national level social
media sites, and outreach to district and national level media outlets.

Area & District Level Social Media Strategy: District public affairs teams will create social media
content related to regional operational initiatives and/or regional policy. In collaboration with
units within its own area of responsibility, each district will have the option of managing a robust
set of social media tools: a district-level blog, Facebook and Twitter. The district public affairs
team will work with unit commanders and public affairs officers to solicit social media content
and to shop that content to mainstream and social media sites (this may be done via the district
PIER site). Finally, the district public affairs team will work with their respective area and
national social media teams to ensure appropriate adaptation of stories, images and video from
units within its area of responsibility.

National Level Social Media Strategy: In collaboration with area and district public affairs teams
and headquarters program offices, the national social media team will maintain the full suite of
official Coast Guard social media tools. With traffic driven from the newly designed uscg.mil
landing page, content will focus on national level policy discussions, incidents of national
significance, whole of government messaging, Coast Guard history, and feature content from the
district and unit level.

Engagement

The permeation of online social media tools into the standard communications toolkit presents
Coast Guard communicators with access to and the opportunity to engage ever-growing and
influential new audiences. Using online tools such as PIER, we can push our messages and stories
to the approximately 150 million + Americans (nearly half the population) who get at least some
of their news from online sources.

These tools also afford us the opportunity for direct two-way engagement with target audiences
which allows us to “listen” to our constituencies and consider both their feedback and criticisms
of how we do business as part of our larger organizational growth process. This engagement is at
the core of our social media strategy and, in many ways, is its very reason for being.

The Coast Guard is unique as an American military force. We are defenders of the homeland, but
also a federal regulatory agency. As a result, we rely on mass communications tools to not only
broadcast our messages but to seek input from those our rules and policies govern.

The Coast Guard is headquartered in Washington, D.C., but the Service is made up of hundreds
of independent commands in communities across the country, and in many instances around the
world. As a result, our communications efforts are localized and our commanders rely on both the
good will and the first hand experience of those who call the community home to be effective
partners in mission execution.
Perhaps the biggest challenge ahead is continued navigation of uncharted waters as a recognized
government leader in the social media field. Our strategy, therefore, must account for an ever
changing online environment and the rise and fall of social networks both in size and efficacy.

Facebook: Transforming the social media landscape

Why the heavy emphasis on Facebook? Simply put, Facebook is dominating the American social
networking landscape. With more than 125 million users per month in the United States (and
nearly 500 million worldwide), Facebook.com is the second most visited website in the country
(after google.com) and its 156 million plus users 1 . As of March 2010 Facebook accounted for
41% of all traffic to popular social networking sites.

As demonstrated in the
chart on the left, only You
Tube received more
unique users than
Facebook over the past
year thanks to the viral
nature of the video sharing
tool and the propensity of
its 108 million-plus
American users to view
multiple videos on the site
during any given visit.
But, Facebook remains the
fastest growing social
media site in America.

1
Facebook.com, google.com and You Tube.com user data courtesy of quantcast.com.
2
Source for both graphics on this page: http://mashable.com/2010/04/19/Facebook-social-media-traffic
YouTube and Flickr - Coast Guard Visual Imagery Network

A significant part of the Coast Guard’s social media experiment has focused on the visual sharing
tools You Tube and Flickr.

As the sixth most visited website in America with more than 108 million users nationwide, You
Tube.com presents an opportunity to tell our story directly to more people than the three most
dominant news sites on the Internet - CNN (21 million plus monthly viewers), NY Times (16
million plus monthly viewers), Examiner News Service (11 million plus monthly users) – after
MSN (115 million plus monthly viewers) 3 .

While Flickr may not have the numbers to compete with You Tube on the video front, the photo
sharing service’s 23 million American users represent a great forum for creating viral
conversations around Coast Guard imagery. Flickr’s ability to accept uploads via e-mail also
makes the tool a great companion to the Coast Guard Visual Imagery database (CGVI) for
district public affairs officers working remotely on a breaking story and/or media deadline.

Using these tools effectively means creating a single national entry point. If we think of the Coast
Guard’s You Tube page and Flickr account collectively as the Coast Guard Visual Imagery
Network and district and topical (e.g. – SAR, LE, disaster response, etc.) playlists and galleries as
the channels which populate that network, we have created a pair of destination portals for our
audience which can benefit units and programs across the service from the interest any one video
or image generates.

3
User data courtesy of quantcast.com.
Coast Guard Social Media Toolkit

As public affairs professionals, we rely on three basic mediums to tell the Coast Guard story:
words, pictures, and video. The social media landscape allows us to take advantage of these core
strengths to directly communicate our information utilizing the following social media toolkit:

WordPress is the blog content management system (CMS) of choice

for nearly 13 million bloggers – including the DoD, where Coast
Guard blogs are hosted. The Coast Guard uses blogs on the district,
area, and national levels to communicate our messages to niche
audiences, policy makers, and specific segments of the public.

Facebook.com is the second most visited website destination in

America following google.com. As America’s fastest-growing one-
stop social media destination, Facebook will serve as the centerpiece
of our social media strategy from Coast Guard units to the national
level.

With more than 23 million monthly users, Flickr is the premier photo-
sharing site in America. In conjunction with CGVI, Flickr will serve
as a means of getting Coast Guard imagery in front of the public and
media outlets.

Twitter allows in excess of 27 million Americans to communicate in

real time via micro blogs of 140 characters or less. While Twitter
tends to be limited by topical trends, it can be an effective means of
communicating with media and niche audiences if properly managed.

The most popular video sharing site in the world, You Tube has an
audience of more than 108 million Americans each month. In
conjunction with CGVI, it is an effective means of getting the Coast
4
Guard story out through our multimedia products.

4
User data courtesy of quantcast.com
Reaching our public affairs audience: Facebook
Social Media and Media Relations

Portals represent the most popular online

destinations for news. The most visited online news
sites are Yahoo! and Microsoft’s msn.com with
averages of 123 and 115 million monthly among
U.S. users. Their audiences are primarily 18-49
year-olds although they do have respectable Yahoo!
followings in the 13-17 year-old and 50+ year-old
demographics. Huffingtonpost.com (22 million)
and CNN.com (21 million) are the most popular
news sites with above average Internet followings
among 50+ year-old Americans.

Social media networks are strongest in the 13-35

year-old demographic. Facebook derives 66% of its MSN
audience from these critical youth and young adult
markets. You Tube finds 57% of its audience here
whereas 70% of Blogspot’s audience comes from
this growing demographic.

There is little question that social media represents

a biased competition to traditional media models.
Every reputable print or broadcast media outlet has
You Tube
an online presence and many are directly engaging
social media networks in an effort to win over
critical demographics that turn almost exclusively
to online sources for news and analysis.

Yet, the healthy overlap between social media

networks and online news sites within the 18-34
year-old demographic provides us with optimal
audience saturation between our social media and Huffington Post
media relations activities within the Coast Guard.
Media Relations’ use of PIER and aggressive
marketing to traditional outlets combined with a
focus on the fastest growing and most popular
social networks is a winning strategy.

Source: http://www.quantcast.com
(Internet averages based on mean audience size for the CNN
top million websites as determined by quantcast)
The way ahead

In the coming weeks, the Coast Guard Headquarters Social Media Team will release a series of
documents to assist unit, district and national staffs in the implementation of this new online
communications strategy.

First up will be information on how to request approval for new social media sites, implications
for existing social media sites inconsistent with Right Tool … Right Level … Right Audience
approach, guidance for off-duty social media engagement by Coast Guard personnel on personal
or unofficial sites, and guidance for official engagement with third-party social media sites.

The Social Media Team will also release a series of documents with further guidance on best
practices and engagement strategies for each of the tools in the Coast Guard social media tool kit.

Conclusion

After several years of experimentation, the Coast Guard’s social media program is poised to
adopt a communications strategy based on best practices and guided by the Commandant of the
Coast Guard’s vision. This evolution of the social media program is a testament to the leadership
of Admiral Thad Allen and represents Admiral Bob Papp’s embrace of social media as a
communications tool.

Following the principles of Right Tool … Right Level … Right Audience, the Coast Guard will
centralize and focus our use of social media tools to complement our media relations program and
maximize our impact with unique audiences.