Launched on December 4, 2009, My.Army.Mil is the personalized and customizable extension of the official page of the U.S. Army and the culmination of a vision by a smart team of energetic contractors, a public affairs office that knew how to navigate the government system, and senior Army leadership who understand not only social media, but also the communications landscape in general.

It all started with the vision of past Secretary of the Army, Pete Geren, who believed the future of the Army depended on the Army communicating with the public openly and honestly.  He also realized how important public affairs is in communicating the Army story to families, as well as to the American public.

Soon afterward, the Army created a new Online and Social Media Division of Army Public Affairs whose brainchild was the new My.Army.Mil, the first of its kind across all military branches in the Department of Defense.

To learn more about My.Army.Mil, and the Army's entry into social media, OhMyGov! sat down with Col Kevin Arata, the director of the Online and Social Media Division, and Robbie Thompson, the contract program lead for Army.mil.

"[The name] My.Army.Mil came from Army doctrine," Arata said, "but we wanted to personalize the experience for the audience."

Col Arata gave credit to early entry into social media to his past boss, Major General Kevin Bergner, who realized the importance of social media and fashioned a social media office within the Army public affairs function that "worked hand-in-glove with the traditional media function."

They wanted to fulfill Secretary Geren's vision to "make it the best website in the world for the best Army of the world," said Arata.

Realizing past websites were not meeting the needs of today's Army, the Army's Public Affairs Office fashioned their early concept on customizable sites like iGoogle and the BBC website. 

The design and development took about a year. "We wanted to take the best in the social media environments, so sites like Facebook and Flicker provided the inspiration," Thompson said.

Being on the front end of this new technology required the public affairs office to work closely with the Army's Chief Information Officer, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, who ensured they met all the Army's information security regulations. To ensure better access to their audience, they got an exception to do external hosting of videos.

"The use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) was very important so we could load balance our content. . . . This was a barrier that Army Public Affairs broke that will help other army organizations," Thompson added.

Powered by open source technologies such as JQuery, PHP, MySQL and API integration, the site offers visitors the ability to customize an Army homepage through Army Knowledge Online and Google FriendConnect, to create a personalized destination for official Army information, ranging from traditional news stories to up-to-the-minute social media updates.

According to Arata, Army generated content comes through the Content Online Resource Enterprise (CORE), the center of Army public affairs communications where over 1300 public affairs officers package the content, to include video.

Visitors to My.Army.Mil can pull up news of interest through a widget. "For example, you can put an installation or command widget on your personal page and you can also get topical information that is being provided by Army Public Affairs Offices," Thomspon said. Additionally, users can pull in external web content with RSS widgets, and place them on a customized hompage.

"My.Army.Mil is connecting the Army on the Web in ways it never has before. In today's global society, it is important for soldiers, spouses, family members and civilians to have the ability to quickly access information that is important to them," said Arata.

In a follow-up story, we'll look at the Army's new iPhone app.

The Army also maintains a presence of the following social media sites:

Facebook

Twitter

Flickr

YouTube

Vimeo