Jason Townsend, NASA’s deputy social media manager, explains that the organization’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory produced the “Seven Minutes of Terror” video. However, the JPL page is just one of over 20 YouTube channels sponsored by NASA, and each of the videos on these channels is produced in a different way. Some of them are created for NASA TV and repurposed; others, like the breathtaking videos of glaciers in Antartica, are shot out in the field by scientists and video bloggers; yet others, like this one putting the Gamma rays from a Fermi telescope to music through a data visualization come directly from NASA’s program managers.

It’s the decentralization of the social media process--ideas and follow-through from every nook of the NASA universe--that allows NASA to produce so much fascinating content. According to Townsend, there are over 460 social media accounts across eight different networks--an impressive reminder that NASA’s not just about the now defunct space shuttle program, it’s about all kinds of scientific breakthroughs from robotics to meteorology. Townsend works out of NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., with social media manager John Yembrick.

Yembrick and Townsend oversee the organization’s overall strategy. But the individual accounts--from Twitter to Flickr to Facebook--are managed at the various field stations, often by members of scientific teams. Take the Hubble Space Station Telescope Twitter feed, [sic] which is run by a team member. “Because it’s run at the local level,” Townsend says, “When people ask questions, they get responses directly from scientists.”

Read more: http://www.fastcocreate.com/1681812/giving-us-space-what-you-can-learn-from-nasa-about-content-and-social-media