Canadian Forces and social media make interesting bedfellows

Posted August 15th, 2009 by cgillen

Twittering in the military.

The problems is obvious; Twitter even greets you with the friendly statement “what are you doing right now?”. A phrase most members of the military shouldn’t answer a great deal of the time. Operation security very often is in direct conflict with the way social medias work where even comments to friends could drift into enemy hands. Leaving brass deciding either to take a heavy hand or trust that their tens of thousands of members won’t accidentally post some detail that could compromise security.

With the marines in the states banning the use of social media and web 2.0 use among all their members it seemed appropriate to sit down down with the Canadian counterparts and find out how our Canadian Forces are handling the explosion of social media use.

Major Doug Allison from public affairs was good enough to talk to me this week and explain how in Canada we do things just a little different.

download mp3 here

Quote of the interview: We trust them to make life or death decisions, we can trust them to tweet

Tags: canadian forces, facebook, social media, twitter