SSSC 23 Things Digital – Thing 5: Social Media #1

On 23 August 2017 I re-familiarised myself with my company’s policies on Social Media. The policies were centred on conducting yourself in a professional manner when online. There is a section in the company’s policy that makes reference to having an awareness of your digital footprint and highlights that this may have an effect, not just on the individuals image, but also the company image.

This policy is useful as the people who use our service or their families can look up their support workers on google and having an awareness of your digital footprint can inform you on what your online reputation is and look to change it if necessary.

The policies also adhered to data protection and right to privacy by stating that employee must not post anything on the internet which could be considered confidential.

This policy is necessary in a social care setting where support workers are dealing with sensitive information surrounding the people they work with on a regular basis. Sharing sensitive information online could not only lead to disciplinary action but could also be a criminal action.

The company policy makes employees aware that allowing use of social media to interfere with working may lead to disciplinary action.

Use of any distracting activity during working hours has a negative impact on the care provided as it distracts people from their task that they have been employed to do.

Overall the policies from my organisation regarding social media are very basic. This is because the organisation I work for doesn’t use social media often. They do have a Facebook page and a website however the Facebook page mostly just shares news and updates from training providers and organisations like the SSSC and the website is out of date. The organisation I work for is a small business and does not have the resources both in money and manpower to maintain a strong presence online.

I read the article “How to Separate the Personal and Professional on Social Media” on Harvard Business Review on 23^rd August. From the article I have identified that I use a content strategy for my social media posts. I rarely post my own content and mostly share content created by other people. In my blogs and website I have a beta reader – someone who checks over all of my content before I post it online in order to make sure the information I post reads the way I want it to and to check that it is less likely to be misconstrued by others.

Although the custom strategy would probably be a better strategy I feel this would be a lot more complicated for me to use as I am not organised enough to keep separate accounts for my personal and work life, particularly as I have two professional lives to balance as a support worker and as a costume maker. I feel the custom strategy would be more suitable for someone more tech savvy than me.

I read the article “Social workers cannot ignore the role of social media in the profession” on The Guardian website on 23^rd August. I agree with the article saying that there is a “climate of fear” surrounding the use of social media in social care. Maintaining a professional boundary when a person who uses the service requests to be your friend on Facebook is difficult especially when you know that that person has full capacity and is capable of making their own decisions.

I feel that the main concern for support workers and other social care staff is data protection. It would be useful for example to have a way to communicate with all of the workers who are involved in the care of one individual to pass messages such as “Mr X needs milk” however in order to do this there may be some staff who work with more clients who would end up with many different communication channels which would be hard to regulate. Also if all of the staff of an organisation were involved in the communication it would run into problems with data protection as the staff would need a way to refer to their client without using any personal details such as their name. It would also have to use a secure encrypted server in order to ensure that the data was protected and small businesses could not afford this.

For now the way of passing messages is that everything is passed to the supervisor/manager and they pass the message on to the relevant parties through telephone calls or face to face interactions. This is time consuming.

Social media is greater used regarding training and personal development where data protection is not as much of an issue. I feel confident using social media for my own development and training but I do not feel confident in using social media to help create a person centered service for my clients as I am very cautious of the data protection laws surrounding social care and I am unclear in how I could use social media in that regard.

Link for Harvard Business Review article: https://hbr.org/2015/03/how-to-separate-the-personal-and-professional-on-social-media

Link for the Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2016/apr/07/social-workers-social-media