Author: Jim

The folks over at Social Media Today had an interesting post up yesterday about some tweets posted by the folks at TSA (@TSABlogTeam) over the Thanksgiving holiday. The author felt the tweets in question (can be found at the original post linked above) were unprofessional given the current situation (you know what I’m talking about).

I can definitely see the authors point here, but I wonder. The vast majority of folks aren’t impacted by the new regulations. Most people aren’t on Twitter. Most people weren’t even traveling! So, really, how much damage could it have done? Like I said, I wonder.

The post, however, alludes to something I’ve spoken about before. Earlier this year, I gave a talk at the Immunization Action Coalition’s Social Media Summit. The presentation is here. One of the points I made during the presentation was about the voice and tone of social media accounts.

The TSA’s Twitter account is an official account, branded with the agency’s name. This is nice for situations where authority needs to be conveyed. But it’s difficult to be personable, which is what the tweets in question attempt to do. Having a personality account (say, @jgarrow) allows one to be personable, but it’s difficult to impossible to develop the authority conveyed by a more official account. If TSA had posted those tweets using another account, say @BloggerBobTSA, while reserving official, more sober tweets for the @TSABlogTeam account, this problem might have been avoided.

Lesson learned: consider who is speaking when conducting social media messaging. If you plan to be silly or to foster personal relationships with your followers, consider developing a personal account. To issue official statements, consider developing a second, branded account.

There was a really interesting article in the NY Times the other day on an outbreak of blisters in a rural Sierra Leone county. That alone is cool enough, but the article focuses on how the locals responded to the outbreak. The author blames a combination of journalism, listless government and witchcraft, but I wonder what the breakdown of blame really is.

The Inquirer, a Sierra Leone news site cited on ProMed, an epidemic-alert service, reported that “the wild spread of the contagious skin disease” was taking over a rural county, with 75 people affected. It quoted local residents blaming polluted water, “poisonous bacteria” or “contamination of the underground,” and said a government minister had “warned people with the disease to cease all movement.”

In fact, a careful reading of the article suggested that local doctors had identified a plausible cause and suggested a sensible solution. But that point was obscured by the purple “Fear Grips City” prose.

So, based upon that reading, where would you place a good portion of the blame?

This is an important point because it shows the very real possibility for a disconnect between the real story and the reported story, even in places like Sierra Leone. Now, imagine your local newspaper, fighting for readers against other papers, Internet news providers and bloggers, all while the advertising funds that have paid them for decades are drying up.

We’ve heard of “force multipliers” before, right? They are essentially things one can add to an action that increase the effectiveness of the action exponentially. The theory is usually applied to military or police actions, but I think it’s an effective term in public information as well. Social media influencers are force multipliers, for example.

The thing is, though, force multipliers don’t always have to be helpful. Take a situation where the public is already freaked by a series of unexplained blisters and add headlines about fear gripping cities. I don’t believe that panic normally happens, but with the right mix of a scary situation and “overwrought journalism,” and, well, you get the idea.

The story of the mysterious blisters is actually quite interesting, so definitely take a look at the original article, if you get a chance.