WILLIAMSBURG, Va. - Agency social media plans are proving especially useful in emergency and disaster situations, said a panel of federal officials Oct. 25 during an industry conference.

"We were terrified about what was going to happen with the flu pandemic and social media," said Jenny Backus, who handles strategy and planning for Public Affairs at the Health and Human Services Department, while speaking at the ACT-IAC Executive Leadership Conference.

"Social media is a place where a lot of rumors can start about what causes flu. We had an untested, never-tried-before vaccine that we developed. One wrong thing on Facebook or Twitter and a whole bunch of people in this country--especially children and pregnant women, that's who this disease targeted--could die," she added.

The interagency collaboration needed to stand up flu.gov and related social media outreach actually forced HHS to dive into social media much faster than it likely would have otherwise, said Backus.

Although social media has proven to be a powerful tool for disseminating agency information, the promise of a collaborative platform where citizens can actually help inform policy still faces some major obstacles. Using social media for anything beyond relaying a message or spurring citizen-to-citizen discussion becomes a slippery slope--crowdsourcing, polling, and even collecting and analyzing comments on an agency post is highly regulated, panel members said.

"There's certain data that we can and cannot collect, inside government. There's certain data that we can and can't collect inside health information, inside government because of HIPAA and other regulations. Those are important things where you can't say: 'Oh, I wish we didn't have to do the privacy thing,'" said Backus.

And while the privacy aspect of data collection is important, it does prohibit agencies from using social media to its full potential.

"We're going to start finding ourselves in a little bit more robust conversation about [this] over time, as we start identifying these areas that aren't really ours. Some of these things will head back to Congress," said Charles J. "Jack" Holt, senior strategist for emerging media at the Defense Department.

"The Department of Defense and Secretary Gates have started to look at what needs to change. And the ability to get him the information that he needs is requiring people to look at the [social media] environment. He's looking at taking Occam's razor to the Defense budget, but in absence of relevant data, he's left with no choice but to take the budget ax," added Holt.

For more:
- read all of our ELC 2010 coverage 

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