Tips, insights, and occasional rants on the modern digital landscape and its impact on government communications, marketing, service delivery, and citizen engagement.
The fall season here in Canada is always full of interesting conferences and events that I have the privilege of being invited to speak at or simply to attend. One of these in particular, is the Public Sector Social Media Conference put on by the reputable Conference Board of Canada.
Over the course of the last few weeks there has been significant discussion about the very disturbing, derogatory and blatantly sexist #FHRITP trend. Let me point out from the get-go that I personally believe there is nothing about this trend that is excusable. It is wrong, period. I would however, like to discuss a hidden story here within the larger issue of sexual harassment.
Last Thursday, in the course of reading about the Hydro One employee being fired from his $100K+ job for participating in this sad trend, I tweeted about how this was yet another example of the need for education on personal digital footprints (something I have written extensively on). A few people took offense to my tweet in that they thought it was the wrong lesson and that “to not sexually harass women” should be the only conversation here. I clarified my position, realizing that it was being misinterpreted and removed the original tweet to avoid any further confusion. I have rarely done this, but in this case I felt it was necessary given another rising trend occurring these days, social media vigilantism, which I will discuss in a moment. Coincidentally, CBC actually released a documentary on Social Media Shaming as this event was unfolding (video screenshot at the top of this post).
This post is based on a comment I left on the following OECD blog post the other week : Measuring government impact in a social media world
One thing I like to do off the bat when working on social media performance reporting for my government clients, is to differentiate between three basic levels of reporting (inspired by some Altimeter Group research) depending on which level of the organization I am working with (using the Canadian federal government structure as an example).
These are as follows: