What do you think of this technology? do you agree with Shane that we will be seeing a lot more of it in the future?

Check out Shane Gibson’s new book:

Sociable!: How Social Media is Turning Sales and Marketing Upside Down

In contrast Britain’s Ministry of Defence has encouraged British soldiers to tweet and blog in an unclassified memo

In fact the Ministry of Defence will sponsor soldiers who want to use blogs and Twitter to share stories of military life with the outside world.

Part of the memo states:

1. Service and MOD civilian personnel are encouraged to talk about what they do, but within certain limits to protect security, reputation and privacy. An increasingly important channel for this engagement, and to keep in touch with family and friends is social media (such as social networking sites, blogs and other internet self-publishing). Personnel may make full use of these but must:

Follow the same high standards of conduct and behaviour online as would be expected elsewhere;
Always maintain personal, information and operational security and be careful about the information they share online; Get authorisation from their chain of command when appropriate (see para 2 below);

2. Service and MOD civilian personnel do not need to seek clearance when talking online about factual, unclassified, uncontroversial non-operational matters, but should seek authorisation from their chain of command before publishing any wider information relating to their work which:

Relates to operations or deployments;
Offers opinions on wider Defence and Armed Forces activity, or on third parties without their permission; or
Attempts to speak, or could be interpreted as speaking, on behalf of your Service or the MOD; or,
Relates to controversial, sensitive or political matters.

The MOD has its own official Twitter account and their Armed Forces Day Facebook page has  over 178,000 fans. For the icing on the cake, the MOD even Tweeted about their new guidelines with the hashtag #whentwitterwasdown