The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2014

34 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Ásgeir Sigfússon is AFSA’s director of new media. He has been with AFSA since 2003. Changing times call for changing attitudes toward member engagement. Here is a report on AFSA’s first four years of experience in the growing world of social media. BY ÁSGE I R S I GFÚSSON AFSA’S SOCIAL MEDIA ROUNDUP B oth as a professional association and a labor union, AFSA has sought to communicate freely and regularly with members ever since its founding in 1924. Starting with telegrams, airgrams and letters in our earliest days, we have utilizedmany forms of communica- tion over the past nine decades. (Who can forget the heyday of the Telex machine?) Since themid-1990s, AFSA has maintained a website andmade extensive use of e-mail to reach members. While those are still our most important methods of reaching out to themembership—65 percent of which is abroad at any given time—changing times call for changing attitudes toward member engagement.That is why, inmid-2009, AFSAmade the decision to join the growing world of social media. Joining the Fray Our first platformwas Facebook, which at the time was by far the most dominant social network. Initially a favorite of teenagers and 20-somethings, Facebook has nowmatured significantly. Accord- ing to April 2013 data from “computational knowledge engine” WolframAlpha, the average age of a Facebook user is now about 26 years, compared to about 20 at its inception. Obviously, the original users have gotten older, which helps raise the average age, but there has also been a large influx of users over 50 who join Facebook to keep up with family, friends and co-work- ers, both near and far. As it has matured, its content has become somewhat more balanced between the frivolous and themore substantive information ranging fromnews to discussions. For AFSA, Facebook has provided an excellent way to reinforce information disseminated through other means, as well as to provide an outlet for news and event information that may not fit into regular e-mail messages, on the AFSAwebsite or in The Foreign Service Journal .This content includes news items of interest to the Foreign Service community, photos and videos fromAFSA events, quick updates and reminders about our programs, and “human interest” stories from the Foreign Service world. Even without doing much publicity, we are closing in on 5,000 followers (equivalent to about 31 percent of the AFSAmembership). More than half of our followers are in the 25-44 age bracket; we havemore female followers than the average Facebook page; and we do very well with users over the age of 65. We have been very pleased with the level of engagement Facebook affords us in con- necting one-on-one with AFSAmembers fromall over the United States and around the world. FOCUS SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE FOREIGN SERVICE