Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland has been hosting the global Thomas Jefferson Award competition in the U.S. Air Force division for the past two weeks. The program recognizes top military and civilian employee journalists for furthering Dept. of Defense Internal Information objectives.
Lackland is the international site for the final leg of the competition, where local judges last week scored top blogs and social media web sites from bases around the world. This week, judges have been scoring broadcast, print, and photography entries. The winners of the global competition judged at Lackland go on to compete at the Thomas Jefferson Awards finals among all service branches in April.
Nan Palmero, Business Growth Specialist at Sales By 5, was one of three judges for the social media competition last Wednesday and said entries ran across all sites, from Flicker and YouTube to Facebook and Twitter.
Palmero said the entry from Incirlik Air Force base in Turkey had a message that might not be known if it hadn’t been posted on social media:
"They wanted to showcase some of the joint work that they were doing because on the Turkish military side, they're kind of reluctant to share some of that information. So, the Air Force wanted to showcase on their end how they were working together," Palmero said.
Joint Base San Antonio Public Affairs Officer Brent Boller said the Air Force recognizes social media as an efficient way to get important information out to its members.
"Well we've found that we get a tremendous number of hits. And particularly on our Joint Base San Antonio website, where we also are able to put up video that complement the stories that we run in our base newspapers," Boller said.
