Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Guest speaker: Jed Sundwall - Social Media Strategy that supports the mission

On Wednesday, February 6, Jed Sundwall, CEO of MeasuredVoice, will join our class to talk about the need for a social media strategy in government organizations.

In preparation, please follow Mr. Sundwall on Twitter: @jedsundwall and read the following articles:


  1. How to Manage Your Social Media Voice with Guidelines
  2. USA.gov & GobiernoUSA.gov: Social Media Guidelines - Making Content Sociable


Please leave your questions for Mr. Sundwall in the comments to this blog post!

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Never EVER Delete a Tweet?

Have you ever posted something on a social media channel and then, a few minutes later (or perhaps hours or days for that matter!) you wanted to delete or edit your comment or post? Well.. if you pursue a public service career you would need to think twice before posting something and even more before deleting it. Professor Mergel suggests that public officials should never ever delete a tweet, and I imagine it applies to any other posts on social media.

These days, social media channels are incredibly fast: within a few  SECONDS your tweet might go around the Earth and penetrate throughout the Internet reaching users of all ages, races, genders, occupations and so on and so forth. As a public servant you have to assume liability for what you let out into the World Wide Web. However, a blogger from Canberra Craig Thomler suggests that in some cases it is appropriate for a politician or an agency to delete their post. For example, if they publish "a social media comment that is factually incorrect it is OK to delete the comment, provided they do so within a short period of time (within a few hours) and reissue the correct information". The reasoning behind this is that if wrong information starts floating around the web, it might cause harm to those who believe it and take it to action. If the information was offensive to the readers though, Mr. Thomler does not recommend deleting it but rather publish an apology through the same channel of social media but keep the original message. You can read the entire blog here.

Taking into account strict conditions of an event when a post or comment can be deleted, I think the point remains - deleting twits should be the last thing a public official should want to do, rather he or she should think twice before posting untested data.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Social Media Taking Over the World.. and the Governments

Social media is definitely a tool that should be employed, carefully strategized and actively used by the governments in all parts of the world to enhance participation, collaboration and transparency. International students at Maxwell School realize this important trend. Today, we start the the class on Social Medial with Professor Mergel, and nearly every student in the class is a representative of a different country. How exciting! I look forward to learning about the use of social media in government and exploring experiences of other countries through my classmates. Good luck to everyone! And..  if you have a hard time getting up in the morning to make it to class by 8AM, just shake it up like this guy in the commercial on YouTube:

Hi all,
I wish you all success in this class,  in doing so hope to share best experience during classes.
This is one of my favorite YouTube videos from Brian Regan.
Reading is good 'n stuff, ya!