As I suggested some time ago, in a post on blogging as a public servant:

If people within your organization are blogging (and you really should know who they are), talk to them about their blogs, the scope of their involvement in other social media and try to get a feeling for how they see the boundaries to their self-expression.

The other critical point that I should have added, is that if they do touch –even only occasionally– on work-related issues, then subscribe to their feed and read their blogs. For god’s sake, make sure you are aware of what they are posting…

Mind you, this is not an invitation to crack down on what public servants are doing in their own time (and with their own bandwidth). A good counter example is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which has recently issued a blogging policy that is, frankly, a little draconian. The key point to note:

Any CBC employee who wants to start a personal blog which “clearly associates them with CBC/Radio-Canada” now requires their supervisor’s permission.
Inside CBC: the official blog

Should we expect that public servants should get their managers permission before they start blogging if they intend identifying themselves as an employee of a government department? In a word, no. From a blogger’s perspective, I would always disclose to my manager that I blog, and that from time to time I blog about my agency’s business. That is just common courtesy.

Would I expect that someone that reports to me would seek my permission before launching a personal blog that overlaps with their professional interest? Again, no. I would expect that they would discuss the matter with me and, if at any time they felt that they were ‘close to the line’ with a particular post, seek advice about the wisdom of posting it. That is both courteous and smart.

The Code

The principles that guide the behaviour of public servants are laid out in the Code of Conduct. The relevant principle is trustworthiness, specifically:

avoid any activities, work or non-work, that may harm the reputation of our organization or of the State Services.

[...] We must use judgement when exercising our personal democratic rights or voicing professional concerns. We must be careful that we act lawfully, and that we do not misuse official or personal information we have acquired through our work. We must always be careful that our actions do not compromise our organization or our Minister.

It’s the bit about using our judgement that is of particular relevance when you consider the intersection of blogging and your corporate media policy. Public servants are paid to exercise their judgement. To suggest that we are incapable of doing it when we are blogging is as ludicrous as suggesting that we should not be allowed to give presentations in public.

Spokesperson vs Blogger

For those of you that are blogging about work, this does not put you in the position of being an official spokesperson. Yes, it is conceivable that a journalist could cut and paste part of one of your posts into an article — just as they could misquote you when you front your powerpoint deck at a conference. But they won’t be able to introduce your view with the words ‘a spokesperson for the agency said…’

Does that matter? Yes and no. Blogging about something that your agency is involved in is fraught anyway. You had better assume that, at some point, you will be misinterpreted and quoted out of context, because to blithely ignore that possibility is poor judgement.

One point worth noting: publishing a disclaimer on your about page should be seen more as a convention than any sort of iron clad protection against dropping yourself and your agency into the proverbial.

Conclusion

Social media are part of the reality of our professional lives. The best way to ‘manage’ it in your organization is to understand it. Read your colleagues’ blogs, join their networks and start to participate in their conversations. Above all, encourage them to exercise their judgement and help build a culture of engagement rather than one of fear and distrust.

It is only a matter of time before a couple of paragraphs on blogging start to make their way into agency policies (media or some other). It would be a good idea if that policy was written from a position of understanding, rather than a scrambled rush to deal with some new perceived threat to the integrity of your external relations.

As a guide, you can always refer to some private sector corporate blogging guidelines, IBM’s are good; but the bottom line for New Zealand public servants should always be the Code of Conduct.

Photo: nib.ipernity.com

I don’t pretend to know anything about the governance arrangements of the swedish state broadcaster, so I can’t comment with any authority on that situation. However, I think it is useful to use this case as a lens to look at what is happening, or would happen here.

There are already a number of public servants blogging (see details of the seminar the Network ran last year), and we are only going to see that number increase in the coming months and years.

So, could a similar thing happen here? I don’t just think it could, I am sure that it will. As we move to adapt to any new technology, there will be inevitable behavioural impacts. The potential of social media to radically alter the status quo should not be lost on communicators. How does your organisation’s media policy deal with the fact that any employee can now publish comment about their employer? Does your organisation have a policy on blogging, or on commenting in public fora by employees?

In 2005, the State Services Commissioner said this:

A more recent online development is the rising number of weblogs (or “blogs”). Blogs range in scope from individual diaries to being part of political campaigns or a company’s business. They range in scale from the writings of one occasional author to the collaboration of numbers of writers. Many weblogs allow visitors to leave public comments.

I am concerned about the potential risks blogs can pose. The existing principles of the Public Service Code of Conduct still apply in this very modern medium and State servants should still be very careful that they do not bring the Public Service into disrepute through their private activities.

SSC 2005 Annual Report, my emphasis.

This guidance is pretty clear and straightforward, but it still relies heavily on the judgement of the individual — and there, dear reader, lies the rub. People will make mistakes. They will hit ‘Publish’ without clearly thinking through the implications of the post (god knows, I do…). They may even be completely unaware of their obligations to their employer and the code, particularly if there is no explicit policy about engaging in social media.

How do we manage this?

As public sector communicators, we need to be aware of these issues and we need to ensure that they are understood by the rest of the organisation’s management. If people within your organisation are blogging (and you really should know who they are), talk to them about their blogs, the scope of their involvement in other social media and try to get a feeling for how they see the boundaries to their self-expression.

Experiment in social media. Read and comment on blogs, get involved in communities and conversations so that you become familiar with the environment, the mores and the technology. In order to be able to advise senior management on this stuff, you have to know how it works.

Trial it. Set up a blog as part of an internal communications programme. Think about podcasts as a potential channel for your internal comms. Try using a wiki for your next collaborative initiative. If the channel is strictly internal it will give you (and management) the confidence to see how it works and to identify the benefits and the risks specific to your business.

Acknowledge that it is inevitable. Include social media in your comms strategies even if, at this stage, it is only a part of your environmental scanning. Think about it in terms of the benefits around engagement, and the risks associated with relinquishing control over some of your agency’s communications.

It is also worth thinking about in terms of how you attract and retain excellent state servants. What will the brightest graduates who enter your agency and are networked with their peers through these media think when they sit down in front of their dumb terminal, effectively cut-off from their social networks?