Spinning up

New job. New passion. New blog.

I’m still in the Army. I’m still at the Defense Information School. I’m still enlisted.

What’s different is what I do. Since January, I have been the school’s first emerging media coordinator. What is an emerging media coordinator, you ask? What do I do on a day-to-day basis? Good question.

Partly because I didn’t really know at first. I was the first one. I could have sat on my laurels and gone home early. That’s not me, though, and it’s not how I landed the job in the first place.

Since arriving at DINFOS, I’d become a pain in the ass. I saw that we weren’t teaching anything about social media in any of our courses. Here we were, the sole military training center for communication, and we weren’t plugged in to the conversation at all. It was embarrassing. It was inexcusable. And so I said as much. Routinely.

The nay-sayers sprouted up in their initial protests, which is usually enough to beat the enthusiast down. I didn’t buy it, though. I was a user. I believed in this stuff. I persisted.

And eventually, after a year and a half of being a regular Joe instructor, the very forward-thinking commandant at the time saw fit to bless me diving in to social media full time. Thus, the position was born. I was to figure out how DINFOS could more effectively use social media (referred often enough by DOD as “emerging media” to denote its independence from purely social constraints).

And, boy, what a hell of a few months it has been. I’ve been able to attend seminars, go to a bunch of meetings, and stave off the pessimists long enough to get some actual content put into the curriculum.

All of this not to toot my horn, but to give you some context on this little journey we’re about to embark on together. This blog is going to help me chronicle the smiles and cries of the social media struggle within DOD. I’m just an average schmo, pushing for new things in stodgy circles. Lord help me, there’s a lot of obstacles in the way. I hope this little corner of the Interwebz will hold some form of encouragement to any who might pass by.

Viva la revolución!

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