The Podcaster

Posts Tagged ‘FederalNewsRadio’

An interesting interview on FederalNewsRadio with Jeffrey Levy, Director of Web Communications at the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) in the USA.

The EPA published an updated guide in January 2010 for their employees on engaging in conversations with citizens using social media.

Jeffrey talks about this being considered a fundamental change in engagement and not just a ‘tick box’ exercise. This means that Government employees need to be pro-active and re-active but within some guidelines in terms of authority to talk on the specific subject matter and investment of time into the conversation (as Jeffrey says – there are a lot of comments on social media platforms that are not worth spending taxpayers money responding to but factual inaccuracies or misinformation should be corrected).

The issue of Goverment employees having rules on acceptable behaviour and engagement with citizens is discussed especially where private and public personas interact. In business this equates to being a ‘brand ambassador’ for your organisation and where private comments and behaviour may have a negative impact on the company.