Washington State Department of Transportation won the Francis B. Francois Award for Innovation for its social networking efforts. Secretary of Transportation Paula Hammond picked up the award during the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials’ annual meeting recently in Palm Desert, Calif. The award, from CH2M Hill, comes with a $10,000 scholarship.
Under communications director Lloyd Brown, WSDOT initiated the agency’s first blog in November 2006. Since then it has used a variety of social networking sites to hear from the public and provide real-time information to the community. The department now uses the blog, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and SlideShare to communicate with the public and the media.
