Hello world!
In the last week or two I’ve entered the wonderful world of social media – or more specifically the world of LinkedIn, Twitter and now blogging.
Whilst this wasn’t quite my first foray into the phenomenon of social media – I’ve had a LinkedIn account for some time, which until now I’ve hardly looked at, and I also have a Facebook account (I can’t remember why) which I look at even less often (at the last count I had the impressive total of 11 friends – including my 2 kids); – I must confess to some reservations.
In truth I, like many others I suspect, don’t really get it (in much the same way that I don’t get camping or rap music or celery). I don’t get why somebody would want to tell the virtual world about their every move and I don’t understand why people would necessarily want to hear about it. And, most of all, I don’t understand how people find the time to blog and tweet and whatever else they do (and, I confess, I’m just a teeny bit jealous that they can).
However, in recent weeks, several people have done their utmost to convince me that I ought to get on board with this social media/social networking thing and share some of my thoughts, experiences and opinions with the world – at least the online world, and specifically the portion of it that’s interested in business continuity management. And they’ve finally convinced me that, whilst I might not yet get it, there are many, many people who completely get it, one or two of whom might even be vaguely interested in what I have to say.
So here I am with my very first blog.
Anyway, all this talk of social media got me thinking about whether or not there might be a potential for using it in a business continuity context. For instance, could blogs, tweets, instant messaging, etc be at all useful for raising awareness of the business continuity programme?; or as a means of providing some basic education for those involved?; or for progress reporting/monitoring?; or perhaps for crisis communications?; or maybe not at all.
At the moment I only have the questions, not the answers, so I thought I’d pose the question to anyone who might have stumbled unwittingly on this blog. If you have any thoughts, opinions or suggestions either way I’d be very interested to hear them. And I’ll be delighted to share them with any returning readers in a subsequent blog.
Must go now – I have a tweet to, well, tweet!
Comments
Since posting this blog, I’ve been made aware (via Twitter) of a couple of interesting articles.
The first is a CNN news report on how BP is using social media for crisis management as part of its response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill at http://www.timdanker.com/single.php?date=1273130820
The second is a blog on using social media for crisis communications at http://www.torbenrick.eu/blog/social-media/how-to-use-social-media-as-a-crisis-management-tool/
Dear Andy,
I am a Masters student at Lancaster University Management School, who spend the past 3 months conducting research in collaboration with Accenture. The research investigated the latest trends in Business Continuity Management practices and formed base for my MSc dissertation.
One of my research findings that may interest you was the realisation to what extent Local Authorities share best practices between each other with respect to their Business Continuity Plans, initiatives and facilities management. This type of knowledge sharing is one of the biggest advantages of the public sector that is only available to few private organisations.
Having read your discussion on LinkedIn in the BCMIX group I would like to make you aware that social media can play an important role in successful knowledge sharing between Business Continuity managers. This is already being done to a certain extent in an unstructured way through BCM discussion groups on LinkedIn. This is one of BCM trends that I analyse in my MSc dissertation.