I’m not saying this is my experience, or my world, but I thought I’d share it with you:

“… The Minister took speeches seriously. He saw them as occasions to demonstrate his erudition by impressing audiences with quotations, statistics and flowery language. He had no sense of occasion: every speech, no matter how informal or mundane the occasion, had to be written not for the moment but for posterity.

All this made Beth’s job a living nightmare. Not only did she have to co-ordinate the speechwriting process so that it met the Minister’s exacting standards, she had to do it in time for both translation into the second official language and for distribution to the breathless media, most of whom she knew would glance at the title and relegate the document to either the blue circular file or to the back pages of the Saturday edition…” (Ottawa Citizen)

That’s from this week’s entry in the the E.X. Files - a weekly column that putatively speaks from the voice of a jaded and frustrated executive in the Canadian public service.

This week, the column focuses on the art of preparing speeches for government ministers.

Here’s a new twist on the implications of social media for government organizations - as fodder for union disputes about the staffing of new graduates.

A couple of former Canada Border Services Agency employees - who don’t seem to have been hired for full-time work after several summers as part-timers - have been tracking the Facebook postings of summer students and new recruits for the Agency.

In these posts, comments and profiles, the recruits talk openly and maybe a little too frankly about their work. Oh - and have posted pictures of themselves drinking while in uniform.

There are certainly implications for an organization’s public image, but even greater are the obvious challenges for the internal communications and human resources teams.

Technorati Tags: Facebook. government communications, border guards