Recently, the U.S. Army shared its 2011 Social Media Handbook via www.SlideShare.net.

If you're surprised that the Army has a social media handbook--or that the policy is more open to the realities of social media than one might expect--then perhaps you also missed the 2008 blog post by David Meerman Scott in which he shared the U.S. Air Force's Blog Response Chart. Why would the USAF need a flowchart for responding to blog comments? Because they started a blog (and several social media profiles) in 2008.

Also in 2008, the Air Force Public Affairs Agency Emerging Technology Division posted their social media handbook, called "New Media and the Air Force." Reading the USAF handbook is like digging through an internet time capsule, into a time long ago when, as page 13 of the handbook says, 50% of Airmen were using Facebook and 75% were using MySpace.

The past is never forgotten; it's never even past. 
                                               — William Faulkner