A really great article on Internet Reputation Management concepts for government was recently posted at FCW, entitled " Who is Watching Your Online Image "? In it, Andy Beal speaks to the cautious but imperative initiave of public service agencies to extend eGovernment initiative into the Social Media space, most especially the blogosphere. But this extension of services and participation in the online dialogue is double-sided; on the one hand, this may offer great advantages to the government agency and its constituents, on the other hand, it needs to be carefully controlled from an online reputation management perspective - though government blogging and social media participation is precisely what may really help, in cases where the agency's reputation or position is besmirched. Here's another recent take on Internet Identity and Reputation Management, from Fox 5 News in DC - more from a consumer and business perspective, than government. But the tenets and advic...

While the domain of "Information Management" is well known to extend to both internal and externally-distributed information assets, it's not so obvious that this domain requires a certain degree of Marketing & Communications expertise. Information governance processes that extend outside the corporate boundary are typically for purposes of compliance, protocol, or other business agreement - though in the past few years it's become more and more necessary to apply information governance techniques TO Internet (or Intranet) Marketing efforts, and leverage Internet Marketing techniques FOR delivering information governance. There are two binding elements between Internet Marketing and Information Management. The first are the search engines and their automated indexers (i.e. "bots") - Internet Marketing techniques leveraged to influence search engine results (i.e. Search Engine Optimization/Marketing) should very much reflect corporate governance of extern...

I recently participated in a very interesting discussion about mechanisms and issues for leveraging external (i.e. outside the firewall) social networking tools in the Federal Government; for example, browsing and executing searches in Facebook, using Flickr for socializing and recieving comments on photographs, and participating in "open" blog discussions. While this isn't necessarily a new issue, and many agencies are gradually enabling "Government 2.0" for both their constituents and employees/contractors (more quickly in the Intelligence arena), the rapid growth and pressure to utilize these tools for mission purposes is unmistakable and requires more rapid, cross-government address (or at least really well thought-out and vetted models for experimentation, leverage, best practice development). Commercial businesses are generally ahead of the curve (from government) in addressing this need, and "Information Governance 2.0" is fast becoming an absol...