When I was little I would get scared a lot at night. Boogy man, zombies, aliens, @andreasmalec’s Chicago accent… you name it when the lights went off it scared me. So what I would do is hide my head under the covers. By doing that I could pretend it didn’t exist, I felt safe and protected. Now of course my threats were imaginary (except Andrea’s accent), but I always felt the best way to avoid my imaginary fears were to hide from them and pretend they didn’t exist.
Some organizations take this approach to social media. They ban it, block it on the server and threaten to fire employees if they don’t stop blogging … everything short of physically hiding under the covers to pretend it doesn’t exist. Much of this fear is imagined. And just like me as a child, if there really is a treat in the room by hiding from it that zombie is going to eat my brains for dinner.
The National Weather Service (NWS) today reinforced a ban on social media and blogging. This lead to immediate removals of a number of blogs and social media accounts by employees of NWS such as Arkansas very own @wxmandan’s blog. This is certainly not the first organization to ban social media by its employees, and I highly doubt it will be the last one.
Their fear is that their employees will release information about local weather conditions before they are verified by NWS. They believe that by posting potentially false information that it will do … something, I still haven’t managed to figure that out.
Their fears are absolutely grounded in myth. What is the absolute worst that can come out of an employee distributing false information? An individual will be prepared for a non-existent threat? Is that not the whole premise of the early warning system?
Other organizations have this same problem. News organizations are worried about having stories go out that turn out not to be true (as opposed to all the retractions they have to make on a daily basis anyway), businesses are worried about secrets being leaked (as opposed to what is leaked by word of mouth), and government is afraid of the release of any information (which can be obtained anyway through freedom of information act). The vast majority of these, like that of the NWS are imagined threats.
The reality is that on the other side of the blanket that groups like the NWS try to hide behind there is a real world that moves on without them. The last major outbreak of severe weather in Arkansas proved this point. This was before the ban reinforcement and the most up to date information came by way of individuals updating each other about the weather. One of those individuals happened to be @wxmandan whose twitter post from that night were some of the most informative of the night.
See, what organizations like NWS and any others that try to hide from imaginary threats like this fail to realize is that the conversation is still happening. By removing yourself from the conversation however you have given up your power to move and shape this conversation. By hiding from your fears you let your fears run wild where real damage can occur. The imaginary threat has the potential to materialize and do real damage to your organization.
