How should social workers behave on social networking sites such as Facebook? Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian
James Hedges (@James_R_Hedges) works as communications officer at the Care Quality Commission
Offensive behaviour: If people are rude to you then you disengage and you try very hard never to be involved in a slanging match. As an old boss used to have on his wall: "Never wrestle with pigs. The pigs love it and you get muddy!"
Boundaries: I think you have to treat Twitter in many respects as the same way as if you were talking to someone on the phone at work, who you knew but who wasn't a personal friend. You can be informal but you still wouldn't be unprofessional.
Claudia Megele (@claudiamegele) is a senior lecturer and the founder of @SWSCmedia
Online versus face-to-face: Social media can re-channel many face-to-face interactions into online exchange. Whether such online interactions will lead to diminished face-to-face contact, and whether the increased online connectivity compensates for a hypothetical reduction in face-to-face contact is a question that is yet to be seen.
Victoria Dixon (@vickydixon) is a second-year social work student studying at Bradford University
Changing attitudes: Social media debates bring the complexities of social care to the attention of many, even if we are preaching to the converted, and so it's a matter of if the momentum can result in a genuine shift in attitude on a larger scale.
Facebook: We were told to "get rid" essentially, given horror stories of students who had set up groups, discussing case studies etc on pages which were open for all to see. The guidance was that it was better safe than sorry. From my experience not many followed the advice!
Martin Webber (@mgoat73) is a researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London
Guidelines: a code of practice for the use of social media by social workers would be helpful. It could be liberating rather than constraining as it may actually "give permission" for people to engage if their employers are more sceptical.
Education: Social media training or engagement should be a core component of the social work curriculum.
Tina Faulkner (@whocareswalsall) is head press officer for social care at Walsall council
Campaigns: Here in Walsall we ran a week-long multimedia campaign called Who cares? which aimed to show people social care isn't all about "putting people in care and taking children off people". We featured a number of case studies and tweeted the calls coming into the social work team.
Trust: In social care people work in life or death situations day in day out. We trust them to do so. We should trust them to be able to use social media responsibly.
Mixing it up: We know that communication is not one size fits all and the more avenues we have at our disposal the better. While we do have some service users who really want a handwritten letter delivered by Brian the postman we also have others who are way ahead of us in the social media world. We can learn together.
Nick Berbiers is a senior children and young persons interim manager and consultant
@SWSCMedia: It provides a form of international social work live communication that was previously impossible. I find it exhilarating and liberating.
Manisha Mahen (@ManishaMahen) is a social work student and Twitter ambassador for SWSCmedia
Resources: A university tutor actually suggested to use Twitter and to search "social work" in which he claimed that you shall gain a lot of relevant information. From then on, I was able to network with social work lecturers, professional and students.
International communication: I never imagined how a city like Kashmir, near India, do social work and by the use of interacting with students on a global scale, I have been able to learn how important social work is in Kashmir.
Nushra Mansuri is a professional officer at the British Association of Social Work England
Giving social workers a voice: In the aftermath of the death of Baby Peter and the furore from the media, social media provided a powerful force for social workers to express their anger at how they were being vilified as a profession. It demonstrated to me that having an alternative means of communication, that was largely unfettered by others, made a difference.
Steve Palmer is press and public affairs manager at the Social Care Institute for Excellence
Using existing networks: Get people tweeting who aren't a natural. We presumably all are because we're on this webinar, but I've been getting staff to start tweeting because they have far better networks than me. The results have been fantastic.
Long-term engagement: People really did see social media as an alien concept. So it's a reminder that only part of the digital-using world is fired up by it. So the challenge remains how to engage with service users on a long-term basis.
Mark Ivory is policy and communications manager at the College of Social Work
Responsibility of guidelines: We feel the primary responsibility for guidelines sits with employers - different employers will have subtly different approaches and these need to be respected.
Twitter is democratic: You don't have to rely on the whims of editors and broadcasters to get your views across – or speak the truth when you feel you have been wronged.
Ian Walker is service manager for safeguarding and family support (East) at Wakefield council
Personal information: We found social workers were using their personal accounts to check out information on client families, eg had the couple really split up as they claimed. Any misrepresentation of identity to access the private pages is likely to be deemed inadmissible in court so access is done in an open and honest way and yet we are still able to find a great deal of evidence.
Jon Bolton (@jonbolton) is a consultant in social work and an associate lecturer at the University of Dundee
Blocking sites: Restricting access will not stop use. If organisational IT firewalls prevent use, people will use mobile phones, iPads. Better to allow and then manage/monitor, than block.
Other guidelines: One thing that I did pick up was codes of practice for social workers' use of social media – the SSSC in Scotland did some work on this in August last year.
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