For years, one of the ways the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) connected with the public was by investing in old-fashioned audio-visual production, usually a series of films teaching safe driving. Despite their best efforts, DMV officials struggled to show these films to their most important audience: young drivers.

Two years ago, the country's largest state motor vehicles agency decided to post the videos online by creating a channel on YouTube. Suddenly the videos that no teenager wanted to watch became a huge hit, according to the department's CIO, Bernard Soriano. Today the DMV's YouTube channel has more than 3,500 subscribers and its videos have been watched nearly 500,000 times; "Kyle's Drive Test" leads the way with more than 250,000 views.

"We think the viral effect of the Internet made them so popular," Soriano said. "It really speaks to the power of social media."

What seemed like a radical idea two years ago is becoming increasingly commonplace. Not only is the California DMV posting videos on YouTube, but "friends" also follow the agency on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Numerous government agencies at the federal, state and local levels are doing the same. Mayors are posting their own videos online (check out some of the humorous YouTube postings by Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper) state legislators are using Twitter, and government executives like Federal CIO Vivek Kundra are blogging. The White House has approximately 1.5 million Twitter followers and 400,000 fans on its Facebook page.

The pace of adoption has been dizzyingly fast. An August 2009 survey by the Public Technology Institute (PTI) found that 72 percent of cities and counties use Facebook to communicate with citizens. Last year, a Public CIO reader survey found that social media didn't make the list of the 10 technology priorities for 2009. Today it's become the No. 1 topic among public CIOs.

So what's going on?

In the broadest sense, social networking and the social media tools that go with it -- often defined as Web 2.0 -- have generated the same sweeping buzz that the Internet's World Wide Web did in the 1990s. Inexpensive or free software allows people to communicate and interact in an entirely new way. Arguably these tools are changing business models: turning information into a commodity that can be used for new purposes and heightening the value of collaboration.

Some believe the same transformation will happen in government as it adopts social networking tools. This new platform for the public sector is sometimes called Government 2.0. Analysts believe the new era of social media represents the first significant development in the digital public sector since the dawn of e-government nearly 10 years ago.

Author and innovation expert Anthony Williams, pointed out in a 2008 interview with CIOInsight.com that e-government was essentially a one-way conversation between government and citizen that provided transactions and services that were online, but still stovepiped. As a result, the value was limited.

"In today's social media environment, these one-way conversations fail to build credibility and trust in government," he said. "With the new, function-rich infrastructure of Web 2.0, government no longer needs to work on its own to provide public value."

The expectation is that Web 2.0 will provide platforms for collaboration between citizens and government, resulting in communities of interest that tackle complex problems. Public programs will no longer be the exclusive domain of a single government agency.

Reaching New Constituents

At this point, government's use of Web 2.0 tools and strategies appears to be a mile wide and an inch deep. Interest and use is pervasive, but social media hasn't transformed the public sector yet.

Here is what's happening: If a government agency isn't using blogs, Twitter, Facebook or wikis, it's looking seriously