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Houston, We Have a Tweet: NASA’s Latest Social Media Launches

by Joe McKendrick

November 25, 2009 at 2:02 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0

The Apollo moon-landing program took something more than technological prowess, as do the current NASA engagements with its long-running Shuttle program and the International Space Station. And it’s going to take more than technology to get humans back to the moon and beyond.

That “something” is political will, which ultimately pays the bills and forges the sense of mission to support human and exploratory spaceflight. And to keep the will going, NASA needs to be a highly effective organization at communicating and networking.

Michael Gray recently explored NASA’s social media efforts,noting how the agency has developed a fairly comprehensive strategy for reaching out to constitutents. Gray points to NASA’s social media hub, which includes links to all the social media areas in which NASA participates. At least 100 NASA employees participate in Twitter.

Gray also points to the fact that NASA “has chosen to divide content into different channels, by mission. For example, there is a Facebook channel for the Ares I-X program, a Flickr channel, a Twitter channel, and a YouTube channel. “What this does is give them the flexibility to cross-post the best content,” Gray observes. “The best photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube were cross-posted into the Facebook account. But the Facebook account has other pictures that aren’t in the Flickr account. There’s overlap, but each channel has unique content or value add.”

The general NASA Twitter account is twitter.com/nasa, which began in January 2009. In a compelling first-hand story, Neal Wiser describes how he got the chance to join the NASA team at its headquarters for a TweetUp. NASA’s goals for Twitter, he relates, are “to connect and communicate with people interested in what NASA does… Services like Twitter give us an opportunity to speak directly to audiences who might otherwise not hear about what we do.”

At the time of the interview, nine NASA astronauts had Twitter accounts. NASA astronaut Mike Massimino was the first to tweet from space, on May 12, 2009. NASA also holds TweetUps — NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory held the first NASA TweetUp on January
21, 2009, and NASA Headquarters held its first Tweetup on July 21. A TweetUp involving the STS-129 Shuttle crew took place on November 15-16. More are planned.

Wider’s observations from his live and in-person TweetUp experience:

“For me, [the meet-and-greet] was the best part; not just because you get to hob-nob with astronauts, who are always cool, but because you get to see that they are real people who are just as curious (and sometimes as confused) about social media as some of us. And while I can’t guarantee that they put their pants on one leg at a time (they are astronauts after all) all the astronauts I’ve had the pleasure of meeting over the years have been friendly, cordial and even funny.”

(Pictured above: The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which bombed the moon in October and uncovered the presence of water.)

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