A TALK ON RESPONSIBLE SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT.
Last September 30, 2023, Ms. Pamela Mariz Germiniano from DILG Cordillera gave a short talk on social media management in local governance development. It focused on the definition of social media, how to responsibly use the internet, the role of social media in todayās local governance, and a lot more.
One topic that I found really interesting was about enhancing and diminishing public trust, mainly because I am a citizen that relies mostly on announcements and news that I see from the official pages of my local government.
In enhancing public trust, there were four main points: transparency, crisis communication, engagement, and accountability.
Being transparent with your constituents is one way to gain public trust. It gives people full-disclosure of where their money went and how itās being used and what is happening with that certain sector of the government. For crisis communication, a communications officer from a department should know when and where to release information so that it reaches the intended audience on time.
Engagementās role in gaining public trust is giving people the opportunity to communicate with the LGU and giving them a sense of control and responsibility over their own areas. This allows the citizens to give feedback to the solutions the government imposes.
Lastly for enhancing public trust is accountability. Now this is interesting to me because I wanted to know how these official pages of the government handle these types of situation where they have to correct an already-published announcement or news that contained wrong information.
Apparently, they could not just delete the post without following the proper steps. They go through a process of analyzing the news and locating the error first before deleting it. Though this is possible, it is ideal to release only the correct information on the first try since posting wrong information could lead to losing peopleās trust over that page and maybe even on the credibility of the government department.
On diminishing public trust, misinformation and disinformation, privacy concerns, and online harassment and toxicity was discussed. Responsible writing should be done so as to not lose the public trust. Journalists should be careful of treating people online; blur their faces if needed and not include confidential details on the post.
I think the thing that stuck with me the most during this talk was when Ms. Pam mentioned that journalists or people working for the government should not use their personal Facebook accounts when attending formal events or official functions. This simple mistake could easily cause the citizens to question your and the sectorās credibility just because of irresponsibility.
Thereās a lot more that Ms. Pam covered in her talk, I just highlighted the topics where I was most interested in. This was actually really helpful and was relevant since our subject was Digital Publishing and it includes discussion on responsible online journalism.
Ms. Pam was a great speaker, sharing her experiences as DILG Cordilleraās communications officer really helped us understand how all these work in a government setting, not to mention her humor and confidence in speaking, I think itās safe to say that she gained the classā trust (pun intended).
