Federal government employees gaining much-needed access to social media sites in order to do their jobs

It's a pretty common challenge these days: social media is on the rise, it's a great marketing tool when used properly, but many communications professionals cannot access social media sites from work. I recently came across this news on ReadWriteWeb.com about federal government employees accessing social media sites from work for professional purposes. This seems like a good first step for our friends from the metro-Denver-area government agencies who attended GroundFloor Media’s Social Media 101 training last week…

Government employees can now access social media sites
Despite widespread adoption of social media by private companies, most government employees could not access the social Web from work—until last week. After nine months of negotiations, government agencies can now officially use YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo and blip.tv thanks to special service agreements that meet federal terms and conditions. The Government Services Administration, which negotiated the service agreements, is currently working on similar deals with Facebook and MySpace. Twitter’s service agreement is already in line with federal requirements.