Coast Guard 2.0

He's no rock star, but the commandant has 2,711 Facebook fans. He also blogs and tweets.

When the U.S. Coast Guard's Boutwell made a recent port call in Djibouti, Commandant Adm. Thad Allen boarded the high-endurance cutter for an all-hands meeting with the crew. The Boutwell is circling the globe, so Allen figured it would be nice to shoot some video "shout outs" with the crew and post them on the Web, so families could see and hear their loved ones during the deployment. It was a typical gesture for Allen. Rarely does a day pass when he or his aides aren't posting photos, video or a blog item for anyone who wants to know what he's up to.

A handful of senior federal officials have blogs, but few have embraced social media the way Allen has. With the boss's encouragement, Coast Guard leaders have created their own blogs to discuss modernization and other issues of concern to the fleet. While his aides shoot most of the pictures or video, Allen does much of the work himself, and either writes or edits his own blog postings. He's been known to respond directly to blog comments, all of which he reads.

For a small investment of time and money, the digital outreach reaps huge payoffs in morale and credibility with young Coasties, says Allen's spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Russell. The Boutwell videos, uploaded to the file-sharing site Flickr, were viewed 25,000 times in the first three to four days, Russell says.

Allen likens his digital outreach to spelunking, "crawling through a virtual cave and just discovering what's there. That's where my kids are, so that's where I'm going," he says of the young men and women he leads. "Some people think I'm crazy."

But he believes if he's going to lead effectively, he must be able to relate to the rank and file. "I'm not going to walk around the deck wearing baggy shorts and [Ray-Bans] carrying a skateboard, but this is a way, despite the fact that I am 60, to have an authentic interaction with these kids," he says.

The commandant has been studying social network theory and the nature of work for two decades, and he sees Facebook and Twitter, both of which he uses, as a natural extension of that interest. "Social media is how people come together to aggregate social behavior," he says. "It used to be the Moose lodge."

Allen swears he's not an "IT type," although he admits he's pretty attached to his iPhone and his Mac. "I do have a great big HDTV, but it's because I have grandkids."