Social Media for Organizations

Greetings from the CSIRO Discovery Centre in Canberra, where ACS is holding a meeting on Social Media and Political Revolution, with Stephanie Hawkins. Stephanie emphasized how social media is useful for organizations for two way communications for clients. She recommenced small dedicated teams for managing the organization's social media strategy and also using internal social media platforms, such as Yammer, for staff to communicate with each other.

Stephanie nominated the Queensland Police Service use of social media for Disaster Management as the worlds best. There is a very useful "Disaster Management and Social Media - a case study" published by the Queensland Police Service:

CONTENTS
Executive Summary i
Background ii
Disaster declared iii
Sudden escalation iv
What were Police Media doing during the disaster? iv
Basic services provided by Police Media during this time were: v
Why did it work? v
Praise from Government vi
The benefits of social media in a disaster vi
Praise from Facebook vii
Lessons learnt vii
Contacts vii
Praise from Media viii

Stephanie emphasized she was speaking from the point of view of a media professional. She did point of that messages via social media also need to be distributed via other channels, such as web pages. But I suggest IT professionals need to also consider the technical needs of social media. In particular when using social media for emergency management, the systems need to be sufficiently reliable. The staff supporting the social media in an emergency will need special equipment, such as backup power and satellite wireless communications, plus training to be able to operate in the event of loss of mains power, water and other services.

ps: I was impressed to see the talk was preceded with a set of slides using standard pictograms, to brief the audience on facilitates and safety procedures for the venue.