Social Media Policy for Public Safety Agency: A Case Study

This case study discusses the social media policy of a public safety agency and the guidelines that need to be followed by the employees of the agency while using social media. The policy strictly bans personal use of social media and requires employees to use it only for official government communication. The policy was created to ensure that no wrong message is conveyed to the general public and to maintain the safety and reliability of the community. The study also highlights the importance of being respectful, truthful, and taking proper approval of the authority while communicating online.

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Case Study
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The social media policy of a public safety agency outlines how the agency and the
employees of the agency should initiate conduction in online (Perrin, 2015). Being the chief to
the agency, it is the responsibility of him to provide feedback for inspiration of cases in the
current practices of the social media activities of the employees of the agency. The head of the
Internal Affairs Unit of the agency furthermore believe in negativity from any and all of social
media activities.
Policy – The employees of the public agency should use the platform of social media only for the
purpose of official government communication (Obar & Wildman, 2015). The personal use of
social media in the public safety agency is strictly banned. Employees making contribution and
comments on behalf of the agency should do it only with the authority of the agency chief. It is
to be remembered that when contributing on the behalf of the government and the public safety
agency all the employees of the organization should keep their postings, legal, ethical and
respectful. No personal thoughts should be posted in the agency websites.
Explanation – According to the personal insight of the chief of the Internal Affairs unit of the
public safety agency, the usage of the social media in the workplace is generally a hindrance
towards the productivity because the use of the platform of social media tends to lead too much
of the personal use. The scope and the purpose of the policy stated above depicts some of the
basic guidelines that needs to be followed across all the forms of social media usage (Guo &
Saxton, 2014). The agency banned the use of social media in the workplace so that no wrong
message is conveyed to the general public. Since the agency works in the domain of public
safety, it is important for them to note the safety and the factors that might affects the safety
process of the public in general. Any wrong comments due to the personal experiences by the
employees of the agency in the platform of social media might make the agency fall under the

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risk of distrust, damage of reputation and reliability of the community consisting of the local
people. Furthermore disclose of internal news of the agency in the social media platform might
also welcome issue and danger for the general public and threaten their safety factors, which is
turn will hamper the main aim of the public agency (Pasquini & Evangelopoulos, 2015). As the
chief of the agency, the policy thus prompts the importance of being respectful, truthful and take
proper approval of the authority together with the understanding of the terms of conventions,
references and etiquettes in case of online communication activities which is of utmost
importance in the workplace. The policy was created furthermore in the thought that no extra
blog post in the social media platform can actually increase the exposure of the brand and their
work and hence there is no need for the use of social media platform in the workplace.

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References
Guo, C., & Saxton, G. D. (2014). Tweeting social change: How social media are changing
nonprofit advocacy. Nonprofit and voluntary sector quarterly, 43(1), 57-79.
Obar, J. A., & Wildman, S. S. (2015). Social media definition and the governance challenge-an
introduction to the special issue.
Pasquini, L. A., & Evangelopoulos, N. (2015, July). Organizational identity, meaning, and
values: analysis of social media guideline and policy documents. In Proceedings of the
2015 international conference on social media & society(p. 6). ACM.
Perrin, A. (2015). Social media usage. Pew research center, 52-68.