By Mike Meikle, CEO at Hawkthorne Group

Feb 26 2010 - In my previous post, we had reviewed the rationale behind the Federal CIO Council release of secure social media usage guidelines.

This was primarily tied back to President Obama's memorandum on Transparency and Open Government and the growing popularity of social media (Web 2.0) in the workplace.

We also touched on the lack of concrete implementation advice by the guidelines for social media within the document.

The guidelines abruptly switch over to outlining the current use of social media within government. But not before mentioning two researchers at the National Defense University, Dr. Mark Drepeau and Dr. Linton Wells.

They are quoted as to the government's definition of social media and the four specific types of uses within the Federal Government.

What is more interesting is that these gentlemen wrote a research paper for the Feds that is a large component for the Social Media Guidelines.

The name of the document is Social Software and National Security: An Initial Net Assessment.

I highly recommend those individuals that are charged with the responsibility or implementation of social media within their agency read that document.

It is highly informative and has copious footnotes to other research that will provide a better view of the social media landscape with the Federal Government and abroad.

Also, it has been my experience that these footnoted sources can then be used as supportive documentation when an agency's own policy is crafted, since they have been used in other official guidelines.

The guidelines discuss at length the direction of sharing and level of interaction in the governmental social media milieu.

Basically it boils down to sharing content within governmental agencies and with non-governmental organizations and how the risk profile changes.

For interdepartmental sharing within an agency the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) rules apply.

Once an agency crosses over into social media interactions with other agencies and non-governmental organizations, the guidance gets diluted. The guidelines point to five government agencies, none of which are the definitive resource for social media implementations.

The five referred to are National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Department of Defense (DOD), Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

NIST has scores of documents, none definitively linked to social media and the policies that should surround it.