Cammie Croft

By Allan Maurer

WASHINGTON, DC – While the Obama Administration has taken its share of political heat, no one says it is not Internet and new media savvy. From helping establish the first New Media department at the White House to her current role as Department of Energy Senior Advisor and Director of New Media and Citizen Engagement, Cammie Croft has played a pivotal role in helping the administration create and shape its approach to new media communications.

Croft most recently served as the Deputy New Media Director at the White House. Prior to that, she was New Media Rapid Response Manager for the Obama for America campaign.

Croft is one of more than 50 Internet gurus, entrepreneurs, executives, venture capitalists and other stake holders participating in the first Digital East conference in Tysons Corner, VA, Oct. 18.

Just the beginning

Croft is already hard at work helping give  the DOE some turf in the 21st century media landscape. On July 20, the DOE launched its blog and Twitter account. Its Director, Stephen Chu now has a Facebook page.

That’s just the beginning of Croft’s efforts to meet its three main goals, she tells us. Those goals are:

Amplifying the DOE’s announcements about its programs, activities and work; providing transparency and accessibility to the DOE’s work; and providing service to and engagement with citizens.

While Croft notes that the first thing she does every morning is look at the comments on the agency’s Facebook page, Twitter responses, new media email, and “Anyplace the public engages with us,” she says.

A different approach

She adds that while there are various ways of setting up online communications teams, such as having a Facebook manager or director of Twitter, she is taking a somewhat different approach.

The media specialists on her team, she explains, “Will focus on key subject areas,” rather than a person focusing on one communications channel and being responsible only for that each day. “So,” she says, “A number of people have that as part of their responsibilities. I think of it as online programming.”

But, Croft says, the DOE blog and social media presence is not all the agency needs.Currently, she points out, the DOE is a large entity with a variety or pre-existing web sites, online programs, Facebook accounts here, Twitter accounts there and Linkein somewhere else.

“We need to rebuild the entire web platform,” she says. “We need to do Web 1.0 really well before we can do Web 2.0 really well. So our first priority is to overhaul energy.gov to make it a better resource for the public.” That includes significant rebuilding of the front and back ends of the site, she notes.

How it helps

“We’re trying to set u a structure and best practices forum to elevate the quality across the agency, but in such a way as to foster innovation.”

One example of how social media helps the agency get its message across happened just recently, she says.

“We have an event with the Vice President regarding our weatherization program. So people have been asking questions about weatherization all this week on our blog and social networks. One person said she couldn’t afford weatherization. We let her know the program is for people just like her. That’s an example of responding to a Facebook comment and providing what she needed within a 24-hour time frame,” Croft says.