If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you understand that social media is increasingly becoming a part of all of our lives, whether or not we hold accounts or participate personally. By the nature of the social media, others using it influences how they act.

And boy are others using it.

It’s become such a hot topic that, earlier this year, the fine folks at the National Emergency Management Association allowed some social media thought-leaders the opportunity to hold a series of workshops about social media’s use in emergency management, preparedness and response. I was lucky enough to have been invited to that day and met folks who are the drivers of the movement to integrate social media into emergency work; truly, my heroes.

On that day, there was also a team of researchers from CNA Analysis and Solutions on site to collect information on the proceedings and produce a white paper on the subject of social media and emergency management. That white paper is being released today.

In an effort to highlight some of the most important parts of the CNA white paper, a number of emergency management, public information and homeland security bloggers are posting about parts of the report that resonate with them. Once those posts go live, I’ll do my best to update this post and link to them. I, as you can guess, immediately wanted to talk about how social media affects our messaging in a positive way. (Beyond teaching PIOs how to think in 140-character bites.)

The first, and probably most important, improvement to our messaging as a result of using social media is the ease of developing a constant media stream. Due to forced character-count limitations, we cannot dispense messages in a traditional press release format; we’ve instead got to just push out the update, as directly as possible. I think this is a good thing for a couple of reasons: first, it expands the audience for your message. While the media might benefit from the comprehensiveness of a press release, most of the public can’t read them, but would appreciate short, two-sentence-long updates explicitly about the situation or topic. Second, short messaging allows you to build a timeline of your incident. Outside of actionable recommendations that should be repeated, updates can be posted once and referred to. What a great way to supplement your IAP!

Another way social media has changed our messaging is what the CNA report refers to as “force multiplication.” Due to the ease of sharing social media messages (which is built into every social media property), our messaging does not have to reach every single person in your public first-hand. Every person that does receive your message and finds it interesting or useful has the opportunity to share it with their friends, thereby increasing your reach exponentially. Aside from simple person-to-person sharing, I believe that a certain element of trust comes into play as well. As fewer and fewer people trust government messaging, hearing a message from self-selected friends and close acquaintances increases the chance that people will listen and integrate the message.

Finally, I think the coolest thing about how our messaging can change is that we can now talk directly to our publics. Like those much-maligned direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical commercials that increased sales, we can now go around the traditional information gatekeeper (in our case, the media). We now have the opportunity to put out those supposed non-story stories, we can now avoid what politicians are calling the “media filter.” We don’t have to depend on what the news producers feel has “made the cut” for their broadcasts. We can finally push out those good stories that we wish the public would know about.

These changes being wrought are the perfect example of a sea change. Be sure to download the full report here to learn all about the future of our jobs.