Friday, September 04, 2009

CENTCOM Gets It

This is a good idea:

MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. (July 1, 2009) — As social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube storm the world, United States Central Command has begun their Twittering and Facebooking in order to better reach the people around the world and get the word out about operations and what's happening in the area of operations.
[…]
"CENTCOM started its social media outreach by setting up its own channel on YouTube and an account with Flickr for still images," said Lt. Cmdr. Bill H. Speaks, who is currently the chief of the D.E.T., U.S. Central Command. "We then started our own Facebook page and are also on Twitter."

Speaks expressed his desire to soon expand the Facebook presence to the predominant languages of our area of responsibility, particularly Arabic and Farsi.

I'm probably guilty of being hyper-critical, but my first thought was "What took ya so long?"  And why didn't you have Facebook pages in Arabic and Farsi that could be launched simultaneously with the English version?  "Hearts and Minds," and all that.  The lack of Arabic/Farsi Facebook pages is particularly puzzling, since CENTCOM's home page is available in both languages.  But, like I said in the opening to this paragraph… I'm being overly critical.  Better late than never.

And speaking of "better late…"  You'll note this press release is over two months old.  But I just "heard the news today, Oh Boy…"


I blame the Navy*.  They're always a couple o' days late and a few dollars short.  (insert smiley-face thingie here)

*see the highlighted bit above.

4 comments:

  1. HAR!

    Whaddaya want. Bandwidth is a little thin at sea. Why, in my day, we had to write letters (on PAPER mind you) that might go out on a helo once or twice a month from the I.O. Meanwhile you guys were surfing Prodigy and Compuserve. (ISFTH)

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  2. Meanwhile you guys were surfing Prodigy and Compuserve. (ISFTH)

    Ummm... not US guys. Remember... I retired in 1985, which predates the generally-available innertubes. I know ALL about paper letters and the vagaries of the APO system... especially when TDY to remote mountain tops in Thailand, fer instance. (I(yet another) SFTH)

    And... the Good LCDR is probably on the ground at CENTCOM HQ at MacDill AFB.

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  3. Cut us a break, Buck! We lose touch with the world when we are out at sea, so it takes us a bit to catch up.

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  4. I can cut ya a sprout IF you've been at sea, BR, but I think the CENTCOM press squids... err, guys... are all at MacDill, as noted above. :D

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Just be polite... that's all I ask.