Sidebar: Social-Networking Tools

Social-networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have outgrown their reputation as a youthful novelty to become marketing tools - not only in the private sector, but also for the public sector.

Government organizations worldwide are growing more interested in the usefulness of social-networking applications and how government can improve service delivery, policies and democratic processes via community feedback collected from social-networking Web sites, according to Gartner, an IT research firm. However, do far, many government deployments of social-networking applications have been limited and lack clear goals.

"Organizations need to articulate a purpose and maintain a balance with social networking," said Adam Sarner, research director of Gartner. "We get so many calls from organizations that say, ‘We want to do a social application for something,' and when we start asking what are the outcome and the hard benefits they are seeking, it's almost unknown. They haven't gone that far."

Yet some government agencies have made the leap into the social-networking arena. For instance, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has Facebook sites and the CIA has used it for recruiting. Virtual worlds, like Second Life, are being used by the U.S. Department of Defense, IRS, U.S. State Department, CIA, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a host of other federal and state agencies.

Counties have typically been slower to respond to social-networking trends, yet Miami-Dade's progressive thinking symbolizes what may be the future of county outreach, programming and citizen interaction.