Sensitive Topics on Twitter

The controversial tweet of Mark Shurtleff, Utah's Attorney General, announcing that he "gave the go ahead" for the execution of a prisoner forced many to consider whether there are some topics that are off-limits in social media. Misty Harris addresses the debate in her Vancouver Sun article. Some experts and bloggers have argued the problem isn't necessarily what the attorney general said, but the medium he used to communicate it. Harris writes:

New media expert Alfred Hermida says the problem is that social media straddles both the personal and the professional, meaning staid messages are inevitably going to share space with posts about people's coffee preferences.

"In some ways, technology moves faster than our social and cultural practices," says Hermida, assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. "The execution (tweet), for example, stands out as inappropriate in that context, even though I don't think the message itself was inappropriate."

But what context would have been appropriate? What medium should have been used - and could or should social media have been involved at all? Shani O. Hilton writes in The Atlantic that just a tweet linking to a press release on the execution would've changed things. At first, I didn't consider this to be much different from what Shurtleff did. And while I'm still not sure of the idea, I can now see a clearer distinction between the two approaches. While tweeting a link to the release would still be using social media, it would be using it much less directly - as a bridge to the message rather than the message itself. A press release, considerably more thoughtful, formal, and substantial than a 140-character tweet, changes the context of the message.

While it's unlikely that most involved in PR will have to deal with a topic quite like this, there is no shortage of serious and sensitive messages that they have to communicate to the public. The lesson we can draw from this controversy is that the medium should match the seriousness of the message you're trying to convey. While PR practitioners don't have to avoid social media completely when broaching these sensitive issues, they will have to be smart about how they use it. Using social media as a means to direct readers to a more formal statement may be the answer.