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Monday, June 22, 2009
TSA wastes no time responding on its blog to critical news story
As a matter of habit, I check the websites and/or blogs of organizations who make the news to see how quickly, and how well, they respond. I’ve been doing this since at least 1996. I remember sitting in a hotel room in New York and checking the TWA website as soon as I heard that Flight 800 had gone down. (The site had been updated to provide information on the crash by the time I visited it.)
So when I saw a story on CNN in which a passenger accuses the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) of improper treatment—leading the American Civil Liberties Union to accuse the agency harrassing interrogation and unlawful detention—I hopped over to the TSA Blog (recently renamed “TSA Blog” from the former “Evolution of Security”). I saw the story on CNN’s website yesterday. The response was up today.
This is an agency that understands the importance of using its blog well. The response, written by Blogger Bob, explains where the TSA beleives it acted within its authority and where its agents went wrong. Bob also notes that the officers involved have already been disciplined for the inappropriate language they used when questioning to the passenger.
Agree or disagree with the TSA’s actions (the rules under which they operate seem pretty clear to me), from a communication standpoint, you just can’t argue with the agency’s understanding of social media as a channel for updating the public as well as engaging in conversation with travelers. I’m meeting Wednesday with another U.S. government agency that is reluctant to employ social media. This is an example I plan to show them.
I’ll be watching for comments to the post (there were none yet when I saw it), but I expect the conversation between the TSA’s bloggers and the public to be as open and candid as everything else they do on the blog.
