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Saturday 29 January 2011

Social Media Code of Practice Part 4

There's one more problem I want to mention about clergy types using Facebook and Twitter, before I start suggesting what I think should be done.
My third problem is simply one of confidentiality. It should be a no brainer, but I think there's a risk here. There's something about online communication that tempts us into saying and doing things that we wouldn't do face to face, or through another means of communicating. Probably because it's all still new to us. Let's face it, most of us aren't exactly at the bleeding edge of new media, we're doing our best, but hey, this is the Church of England. Doing things on the cheap is what it's all about. 
Mostly that just makes us look a little quaint and amateurish. But sometimes it can be worse, because our day job is dealing with people's lives (that and the Almighty, of course.)
And so we might break a confidence, we might tell our friends and (accidentally) the wider world something that we should have kept to ourselves. But we didn't understand the privacy settings. Or we meant to reply to one individual, but sent a public tweet instead. Easily done. No so easily undone.
We haven't got the time to read the online help. And even if we did, we might not understand it anyway. Do you know your way round Facebook's privacy settings?

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