Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Ochocinco runs his own media empire of sorts. He is one of a growing number of Internet users who are as much a content creator as they are content consumers. He communicates publicly with his fans on social media site Twitter (@OgoChoCinco) and interacts with fans in his live video show, hosted for free on UStream.TV. It is shot with nothing more than a laptop and a Web cam.
But Ochocinco’s social-media persona has put him at odds with the NFL because of the league’s policy on social media. Controlling his activities, though, has proven to be a difficult task.
When the league banned updating Twitter during games, he began signaling to representatives in the crowd to update his account for him. When they banned that, he began flying random Twitter followers to his games in protest.
The NFL is struggling with an issue that many other organizations are attempting to address, as more people put more of their lives online for all to see. And these ever-public personas make it more challenging for organizations to channel communication through traditional channels.
When Microsoft announced to employees that it would be upgrading its search engine product, Bing, the word quickly spread across the Internet through the wayward tweets of a few employees at the company’s annual meeting. The tweets were promptly deleted, but the news had already gotten out.
More recently, three ABC News employees updated Twitter by messaging that President Obama had called rapper Kanye West “a jackass” after the comment was overheard during an off-the-record conversation with a CNBC reporter. Like the Microsoft incident, the “tweets” were promptly deleted but the word was out.
In both cases, cached versions of the messages lived on after the actual messages were deleted, and many had taken screen captures of the messages before they were deleted, further compounding the problems for Microsoft and the Obama administration.
Eventually, video of the incident also spread through social media channels, where it will continue to live even if it is never rebroadcast on a television news network again.
Richard Wald, a former ABC News executive and professor at Columbia University, said the issue also raises ethical questions about the publication of such material by professional journalists.
“You need to reinforce the sense that you have to verify before you publish,” Wald told the Associated Press. “The policies may be very comprehensive, but they may not be adequate to the technology that news organizations have.”
As the use of social media continues to grow, the technologies pose several issues for professional communicators. How much can organizations ever hope to control their employees’ public communications? Is it possible to monitor the efficacy of such policies given the number of channels available? What are the ethics involved in journalists republishing those communications?
For a look at what some organizations are doing, check out this database of social media policies at various organizations.
Afterthoughts: While handling social media use by employees has proven difficult for organizations of all kinds, social media use poses unique problems for journalism organizations. Regulating the communication of professional communicators just has its own set of challenges.
Over the summer, there was a great deal of discussion after several large organizations – the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Associated Press, and others – released their policies. That debate was reignited last week when the Washington Post released a social media policy after a high-level staffer opined on Twitter about current events. For a good summary of the debate, see this post at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab; read the full policy here.
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