The Impact of Social Media on the Military

Earlier this week, I addressed the topic of social media in the military and government on a panel at The Army and The Navy Club in Washington, DC. With so many of our clients deeply entrenched in various social media campaigns, I found the panel to be a great opportunity to share our experience in the nonprofit and civilian sectors with military leaders.

From my perspective, the central theme of the panel was that social media is a permanent fixture of government communications. This point was addressed by one of the panelists, Dr. Alan Rosenblatt from the Center for American Progress, who referenced a Wall Street Journal story indicating that worldwide more internet users communicate via social media channels than email. From Twitter to Facebook the exponential increase in social network messaging at the expense of more established communications mediums (mail, email, etc.) cannot be ignored by the government and military.

As I pointed out, the use of social media as a new communication platform introduces serious security and privacy concerns, including new vectors for cyberattack, that government and military organizations cannot ignore. But, these platforms also provide the potential for government organizations to improve the satisfaction of their employees as well as citizens by enabling more open, transparent, collaborative, and participatory communications and offer the potential to increase workplace efficiency, productivity, and innovation.

For these reasons, I shared that the Federal CIO Council and others have recommended that government organizations make better use of social media throughout the government and military so long as their use is in-line with security, privacy, and confidentiality laws and policies. The challenge is that many of these laws and policies still need to be updated to account for social media and other Web 2.0 technologies. Although significant progress has been made in the last few years, the continued absence of such action by the legislative and executive branches continues to inhibit the use of social media by government.

One of the somewhat contentious points raised by the panel was on the topic of how government leaks are enabled by social media. The third panelist, Alex Tang from the Federal Trade Commission, felt that the current laws and policies address the illegality of leaking information regardless of the communications medium. I pointed out that although the world now promotes public collaboration and discussion on a wider range of topics than in the previous century, the importance of private discussion on a very small number of issues by the government and military remains paramount for proper governance and national security. As evidence of this point, I cited the continued need for closed door deliberation of important legislation by Congress, the classification of information for national security related issues, and the ability for diplomats to hold private audience on important foreign policy issues. I did not see this as undermining the principles of Open Government, as defined in the Open Government Directive.

While there may have been disagreement as to the scope of what information should be public verses what should be private, there seemed to be universal agreement among the panelists on the importance of social media training for government civilians and military personnel. There was broad consensus that this training must be far more intensive than a brief five-minute overview given the complex nature of social media, including the fact that many people don’t even understand the privacy settings on the majority of public social media sites.

I even recommended that regular social media training be put in place by all human resources departments, along the same lines as diversity and sexual harassment training. Without this type of training, the improper use of social media by government and military personnel will surely continue.