It was one year ago that the NRC unveiled its first foray into social media with this blog. We didn’t know how it would be met – and weren’t entirely sure what we were doing. But we were hopeful the blog would give us a new avenue to educate and inform the public about what the NRC does, and provide a place for meaningful dialogue with the public.
We were extremely happy with the response from Day One. It far outweighed our expectations. We also quickly realized that we couldn’t – and shouldn’t – restrict comments just to the topics we were covering. With the OK of Chairman Jaczko, we created the Open Forum section, which allows all readers to talk, vent, question, praise or criticize about any NRC-related topic on their mind.
In our first year, we put up about 150 posts, which generated almost 1,000 comments and 170,000 views. By far the most popular were those posts that went up in March, in response to the events in Japan. Other topics garnered attention, too – the North Anna earthquake, the River Bend flooding, Open Government and the lessons-learned from Fukushima.
We want to thank you for taking the time to read this blog. We hope we’ll continue to earn your attention in 2012. The blog is now also joined by Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, and we hope you’ll access those sites as well.
And, as always, we welcome your comments. Let us know what topics you’d like covered in the future or any way we can make this blog more interesting and relevant to you.
Holly Harrington Blog Moderator
U.S. NRC Blog 