Presentation by Dena Gray-Fisher, director, Media and Marketing Services, Iowa Department of Transportation given Oct 1, 2008, at the DOT Supervisors' Conference

1. Contemporary
Communication
Technologies
Getting your buzz on
Dena Gray-Fisher, director
Office of Media and Marketing Services

2. The new age of e-communication
• Today’s new Internet tools and technologies
are created around the notion that users
want to be active contributors, rather than
passive observers.
• Today’s online and mobile communicators
are:
– Engaged – Generating content
– Collaborating – Creating
– Sharing – Networking
– Making choices – Speaking up
– Empowered

3. Revolutionizing the way
we do business
• “An increasing demand by citizens and businesses,
fueled by advancements in technology, for faster
response to ideas, suggestions and concerns” is
identified in the DOT’s Strategic Plan as a challenge
for the department.
• DOT Internet policy – Making the business case of
how these technologies help:
– Me do my job.
– My team reach its goals.
– The department accomplish its mission.
– Better serve our customers.

4. Changing public expectations
• I want it …
• I want it now …
real-time and
instantaneous
• I want it my way …
• I want it any time … day or
night

5. So, what’s the buzz?
• Tweets
• Chats
• Blogs
• Tags
• Wikis
• Avatars

6. Blogs
• Allow users to create and display online posts/logs
• Can permit readers to comment
• Can be moderated to weed out inappropriate
contributions
• Can include multimedia
• Considered more informal/conversational
• Personalize and humanize an organization,
creating a positive public image

7. Blogs (blogger.com free from Google )
®
http://iowadotprdemo.blogspot.com/

8. DOT news blog (TypePad®)

9. RSS – Really Simply Syndication
• RSS saves time by letting users choose to receive content from
a number of Web sites and read it in one place.
• RSS feeds alert users when new material is posted on the Web
sites that offer them.
• To read an RSS feed you need a feed reader.
• Once you have a reader, it’s a matter of finding sites that offer
RSS feeds and adding them to the list your reader checks.
• It's not just for news.
– Severe weather alerts - Airport delays
– Traffic updates - Job openings
– Public meeting notices - Bid notices
– New additions in the library

10. Iowa DOT’s RSS feed

11. Twittering
• Twitter® is a free social networking and micro-
blogging service that allows users to send and read
other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets),
which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in
length.
• Tweets can be sent directly from your cell phone to
the Web.
• Twitter can be a powerful communications tool for
business groups that need live interaction.
• Twitter and Twitter-like services can enhance the
level of interaction for happenings like Webinars and
videocasts.

12. Twittering – Los Angeles Fire
Department tweets

13. Forums
Originally modeled
after the electronic
bulletin boards of
the world before
the Internet,
Internet forums
allow users to post
a quot;topicquot; for others
to review.
Other users can
view the topic and
post their own
comments in a
linear fashion, one
after the other.

15. Electronic newsletters

16. Electronic notices to subscribers
• DOT auction notices
• Design Manual
revisions
• TIME-21 funding
notices
• News releases
• Des Moines area
metro alerts
• Council Bluffs
Interstate
reconstruction
project alerts

17. Live chat
Live chat is a great customer service tool
that goes a long way towards earning
consumer trust .
– Set your own hours of service.
– Offer superior service in real time.
– Be available when off-line by enabling visitors
to leave messages, forwarded to your E-mail.
– Secure and private instant messaging.

18. Live chat – state government use
State of California
State of Ohio
State of Virginia
State of Utah
State of South Dakota
State of Minnesota
State of Oregon
State of Kansas

19. Avatars (personalize the user experience)
Artificial intelligence technology
now allows realistic-looking
animated characters (or “Bots”)
Carly, an interactive avatar to respond to user questions
(character) named after the with context-sensitive spoken
city of San Carlos, resides answers. The answers are
stored in a preprogrammed
on a computer screen at knowledge base.
the city hall’s front desk.
Visitors get valuable city
hall information by clicking
the icons and interacting
with Carly.

20. SecondLife®
• SecondLife is an
online, 3-D
virtual world.
• Avatar images of
visitors (that you
create yourself)
move about the
virtual world.
• Missouri was the
first state to use
SecondLife to
recruit IT talent.

21. File hosting and sharing
• Documents
• Photos
• Video
• Audio
• Data
• PowerPoint presentations

22. Share your PowerPoint
presentations

23. Share a large file

24. Video sharing via YouTube
• Iowa DOT’s teen
driver/work zone
safety education
program
• YouTube
features public
service videos
produced by
teens as part of
the Restrain
Yourself contest.

25. Real-time project management
and collaboration
• Thanks to collaborative software, the days
of crowding around a conference table to
brainstorm are gone.
• Employees can meet online to integrate
their work, develop ideas, set goals, send
messages, build systems, and manage
projects – all in real time.
• Share interactive calendars, pictures, videos,
tasks, polls, comments, contruction plans,
blogs, files, designs, music, maps,
documents, and much more.

26. Share a project calendar

27. Edit documents collaboratively

29. Whiteboarding
• Take your brainstorming
exercise or group meeting to
the next level. There’s no
reason to sit in the same room any more.
• Whiteboarding is online version of the traditional
wall-mounted board that allows more than one
person to mark up the board at the same time.
• All changes are kept in sync with one another in
near real time and the final product saved/
printed.
• Chatting while using the whiteboard enhances
the communication process.

31. Social networking
• Social networking is the
use of a Web site to
connect people who
share personal or
professional interests,
place of origin, ethnicity,
education at a particular
school, etc.
• It’s not just for
teenagers, businesses
are using these
sites as hosting
platforms.

32. DOT’s using Facebook
• Georgia – recruitment of interns, coop
students and transportation engineering
assistants
• Maryland – intern recruitment
• Michigan – connecting everyone who
works or has worked for MDOT
• Missouri – human resources, news feed,
winter safety messages, discussion group
for construction projects, photo sharing
• Rhode Island – employee recruitment
• Virginia – intern recruitment, to fill summer
jobs, diversity leadership program
• Washington – human resources

33. Professional networking
• LinkedIn.com®
allows you to find
communities of
professionals who
share a common
experience,
passion, interest,
affiliation or goal.

34. Ethnic social networking sites
• The emergence of niche
social networking sites
may arise from our
need to build a
community with people
we do not personally
know, but who we feel
affiliated with.
• Marketers and human
resource recruiters are
tapping into these sites.

35. Virtual education and training
• Online tutorials
• Live labs
• Breakout rooms - ability to assign
individuals to rooms for small group
collaboration
• Hand-raising for verbal questions
• Question manager for written questions or
threaded discussion by topic
• Live video
• Handouts

36. Virtual meetings
• A low-cost alternative
to real-time video
conferencing.
• Used with a
simultaneous audio
conference call over
regular telephone lines or
using chat.
• Ability to centrally control the
simultaneous presentation of
text, graphics, images, and
video on every participant’s
screen from one location.

37. Webinars

38. Wikis
• A wiki is a Web
page whose
content can be
edited by its
visitors.
• Examples
include
Wikipedia,
Wiktionary and
Wikitravel.

39. Social bookmarking
• Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users
to store, organize, search, manage, and share
bookmarks of Web pages on the Internet.
• Bookmarks are tagged/labeled so they can be
sorted by topic.
• Social bookmarking enables professional groups,
agencies, work units or teams to save bookmarks
to the same site. This can be a tremendous time
saver for groups looking for similar information.
• Libraries have found social bookmarking to be
useful as an easy way to provide lists of informative
links to patrons.

40. Social bookmarking – the salt shortage
http://delicious.com/Maverick2008

41. Surveying and polling
• SurveyMonkey.com
• freeonlinesurveys.com
• eSurveysPro.com
• polldaddy.com™
• questionpro.com
• freesurveysonline.com
• coolsurveys.com
• surveypopups.com

42. Podcasting
• Podcasting is a way of publishing audio and video
broadcasts via the Internet.
• Podcasts are feeds that contain digital audio and
video files, such as MP3, MP4 or M4V files.
• A podcast feed reader is needed to view or listen to
the feeds.
• Once you subscribe to a podcast, you can either
listen/watch it on your computer or transfer it to a
portable MP3/video player, such as an iPod.

43. Podcasting

44. Streaming multimedia
• With streaming media, a Web user does
not have to wait to download a large file
before seeing the video or hearing the
sound.
• Instead, the media is sent in a continuous
stream and is played as it arrives.
• The user needs a player, which is a special
program that uncompresses and sends
video data to the display and audio data to
speakers.

45. Streaming media

46. Business applications
• Once again the equations that
determine the way we work and live are
being rewritten.
• How can you use these utilities:
– As individual employees.
– As teams and work units.
– As a department.
– As a customer.