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Jul 4, 2009

Social Security Wants To Monitor Social Media

From Federal Computer Week:
Social Security Administration (SSA) officials plan to hire a contractor to monitor what the public is saying about their agency on social media Web sites such as MySpace, Twitter and YouTube, according to a contract request from SSA. ...

The monitoring will cover blogs, social networks, traditional media and video Web sites such as YouTube, the announcement states.
In a sense I can understand this, but in another sense I can imagine the company getting this contract might also get a contract to do the same thing for the Iranian government. What do you think?

Update: I have done a cursory search on Twitter and Facebook and am coming up with nothing of any consequence concerning Social Security. There is a Mike Astrue with a Facebook page, but I expect that it is bogus since that Mike Astrue is indicated to have only one friend. Are you aware of any social networking sites that would be of interest to readers of this blog?

8 comments:

  1. I think it is another waste of our money.

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  2. A#1 is right. Also, with vast buildings full of analysts who analyze for a living, why not just let them use Google to do the same thing? You know, it wouldn't take long. Of course, just goes to show you that da COSS will spend money on anything except staff. As if we didn't know. snark.

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  3. How about a hearty wait and see? Ideally you use it like some businesses (ie. Comcast) where you immediately assign someone to reach out to the complaining person to see if the issue can be resolved and try to identify the cause.

    I have my doubts though that AFGE is going to let information gained go into employee evaluations to make retention/retraining/promotion decisions and that's an important element of such a strategy.

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  4. Maybe AFGE has a point. The quality of the reporting on the stuff we see reported here isn't great. On the other hand, if you end up in the papers you're definitely gonna hear about it. Pays to know what's going on in your own shop, wouldn't you say? And, if as in many stories reported here, unnecessary delays for terminally ill people make the news, a manager out there needs to know who, what, when and where. The AFGE's job is to defend people. Managers have a much less enjoyable job. Enuf said.

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  5. The Mike Astrue on Facebook with only one friend might be the COSS, since the one friend he has is probably whoever keeps defending him here.

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  6. Fun thing is that in the office were I work in MySpace, Twitter and YouTube are blocked.

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  7. This is the same thing as a clipping service, just for online media. If they already do that, then this is not such a big deal.

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  8. Clipping service is done in-house.

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