I had an opportunity to participate in a workshop hosted by the JSC Social Media Working Group at NASA Johnson Space Center today and thought I’d share the presentation I gave.  What’s interesting about this presentation is not so much how NASA is currently using social media, but how it might use social media in the future.  NASA has really embraced social media and is making great strides at engaging people in the NASA mission.  What I’m interested in, is how can NASA use social media in the future to further it’s mission. I posed this question to the audience (using an interactive online poll) by asking”What’s Next?”  It was a wide open question and I included a few of the answers below.  What do you think?  What’s Next?

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“Bridging public to space workers and their environment, i.e., what exactly are you doing? How can I participate?”

“Really engaging in public outreach build connections!”

“Get our current workforce fully involved!”

“Using social media to fish for ideas to solve specific problems.”

“Moderated mission video that highlights several parts of the launch along with real time q&a with viewers and NASA experts”

“Virtual moon lab”

“Distributed telepresence exploration”

“I would love to be able to look at mission control and station consoles real time.”

“Open problems to the public to help NASA”

“Allow people to take space walks virtually”

“Make astronauts the rockstars that they are. NASA is so powerful it could be part of the cult of personality.”

“Public virtual presence on moon, Mars, beyond”,

“Unless the U.S. government gets behind U.S. HUMAN space exploration, the question of using social media is a mute point for space exploration”