US NRC Blog Update: Happy New Year and Some NRC Blog Updates

U.S. NRC Blog

Happy New Year and Some NRC Blog Updates by Moderator Eliot Brenner Public Affairs Director   Two years ago, at the end of this month, the NRC made its first foray into social media with this blog. We didn’t know what to expect, but we knew we needed a new way to provide information to the public about – and explanations of – the important, but frequently complex and technical activities of the agency. We were pleased with the initial interest in the blog, which sky-rocketed during the March 2011 events in Japan, and which spiked again during the August 2011 earthquake in Virginia and this fall’s Hurricane Sandy. Some stats for 2012: we put up 138 posts and approved 893 comments, and got some 126,000 views. And we have 700+ subscribers. Also during those 12 months, the NRC sent out 540 tweets (to 2,996 followers), posted 47 videos on YouTube (which got 17,170 views) and posted 1,100 photos on Flickr, with 93,000 views. We are continuing to look at new ways to make our social media program interesting and relevant to you, and we may have some news in that regard later in the year. So stay tuned. We are making a few small changes to the blog for 2013. We’ll be using more specific tags to make it easier to find our content. We’re also moving the bylines up to the top, so you’ll know right away who has authored the post. And when we can, we’ll be adding more links and more interactive content. We hope to continue to see the lively conversations in the comments to our posts. We approve and post comments several times a day to reduce delaying the conversation. In only a few instances, we have not approved comments because they didn’t meet our blog comment guidelines. If the comment is determined to be an allegation, for example, it will not be posted (but you will be contacted by our allegations team.) If your comment is a personal attack, we also cannot post it. Some comments lately have drifted into this category, so we ask that you be respectful to other commenters and their points of view so that we can approve your comments. Also remember that comments need to be related to the post under which they are submitted. If they’re not, we’ll move them to the Open Forum section. We encourage you to post there when there’s something you want to talk about, but about which there is no recent post. Which brings me to my last point. We would love to know what you’d like us to cover for the new year. What topics are of interest to you? What do you want to know more about – or perhaps get a plain language explanation of? Please let us know in the comment section below and we’ll try to tailor future content to your needs. Happy New Year to you, and thank you for reading the NRC’s blog. Moderator | January 3, 2013 at 9:41 am | Tags: NRC, nuclear, social media | Categories: General | URL: http://wp.me/p1fSSY-Vp