Public officials, human resource managers, and policy makers debate the benefits and drawbacks of social media use for communications among government agencies, among distributed personnel, and to members of the public. However, time and again, reports of misuse lead to concerns that use of Web 2.0 poses a significant problem to be managed.
Recent news of a scorned lover who mistakenly posted content to the Twitter feed of the organization for which they worked is but one example of a potential mishap. Accounts of employees using work hours to chat with friends or build their networks have become prevalent, so much so that one blogger has suggested that in the future, cigarette breaks will be replaced by 'social media breaks'. These examples alone provide plenty of reasons for managers to question whether the cost to the tax payer and risk to the organization outweighs the benefits of engaging these tools.
In light of these concerns, it is important to also raise the following question: Is the consequence to your organization or affect on disaster response capabilities greater, if you choose NOT to use social media to connect with personnel, distributed organizations, or the public? Put another way, how risky is it to cut off a communications mechanism that has the potential to connect people in real time, facilitate the observation of online chatter, or serve as a secondary mechanism to communicate warning and risk messages? Can you afford NOT to do it?
There is, of course, a broad spectrum of ways to engage social media. An excellent overview on six potential designs was presented by Glen Woodbury at the recent NEMA conference. He suggests that an organization can choose to suppress (issuing policies or directorates that expressly forbid the use of a particular technology), defer (to ignore, abstain, or dismiss even though the use of technology is evident in their operating environment), adapt (reactive; observation of the use of tools leads an organization to enter that communications environment to create and share its own content), adopt (proactive; in advance of an event, an organization decides to use technologies that are in the public domain), influence (an organization deliberately influences how a technology or tools is used, maintained, or operated), or design (an organization determines requirements for new technologies and seeks to influence the design or production for those needs).
Examples can be cited for each of these designs above and it falls to the organization to determine the risk associated with using new media for their internal operations and external communications.
I'm very interested to learn about how emergency management and public safety organizations are entering the landscape of social media use for disaster preparedness and response. If you have a policy to share, or a story to tell about why your organization has chosen to suppress, defer, adapt, adopt, influence, or design, please share it with me. By learning from others, we are likely to conduct better practices in the future.
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Recent news of a scorned lover who mistakenly posted content to the Twitter feed of the organization for which they worked is but one example of a potential mishap. Accounts of employees using work hours to chat with friends or build their networks have become prevalent, so much so that one blogger has suggested that in the future, cigarette breaks will be replaced by 'social media breaks'. These examples alone provide plenty of reasons for managers to question whether the cost to the tax payer and risk to the organization outweighs the benefits of engaging these tools.
In light of these concerns, it is important to also raise the following question: Is the consequence to your organization or affect on disaster response capabilities greater, if you choose NOT to use social media to connect with personnel, distributed organizations, or the public? Put another way, how risky is it to cut off a communications mechanism that has the potential to connect people in real time, facilitate the observation of online chatter, or serve as a secondary mechanism to communicate warning and risk messages? Can you afford NOT to do it?
There is, of course, a broad spectrum of ways to engage social media. An excellent overview on six potential designs was presented by Glen Woodbury at the recent NEMA conference. He suggests that an organization can choose to suppress (issuing policies or directorates that expressly forbid the use of a particular technology), defer (to ignore, abstain, or dismiss even though the use of technology is evident in their operating environment), adapt (reactive; observation of the use of tools leads an organization to enter that communications environment to create and share its own content), adopt (proactive; in advance of an event, an organization decides to use technologies that are in the public domain), influence (an organization deliberately influences how a technology or tools is used, maintained, or operated), or design (an organization determines requirements for new technologies and seeks to influence the design or production for those needs).
Examples can be cited for each of these designs above and it falls to the organization to determine the risk associated with using new media for their internal operations and external communications.
I'm very interested to learn about how emergency management and public safety organizations are entering the landscape of social media use for disaster preparedness and response. If you have a policy to share, or a story to tell about why your organization has chosen to suppress, defer, adapt, adopt, influence, or design, please share it with me. By learning from others, we are likely to conduct better practices in the future.
