Poke if By Land, Tweet if By Sea

In the last couple of years, social media has become all the rage. Friendster has been joined by the likes of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Now, it seems, Uncle Sam is joining the bandwagon.

That’s right. The military is now embracing social media as a means to reach out to new recruits. With the shift of 18-year-olds toward online communities, this figures to be a smart move for recruiters. As Lt. Gen. Benjamin Freakley said in Newsday, "you could friend your recruiter, and then he could talk to your friends.”

There are other practical uses as well. These applications can be used as a sort of virtual town hall, a place where the military can receive and answer questions as fast as the public can dish them out. The cool thing: Anybody who wants to have a question or gripe answered directly from the horse’s mouth can, within reason.

This is definitely a shift from the military’s previous stance that social networks could be a haven for terrorists. “I'm sure there was the same pushback years ago when somebody invented the telephone. 'Ooh, you can't talk there because somebody might hear you,” said Lt. Col. Kevin Arata, a manager for a subset of the Army’s public affairs office. “Well, that's the whole point. We want people to hear us.”

--Brandon B.