Author: Jim

Let’s say you’ve got something big happening. A disaster, or the potential for a disaster. A weather emergency, say. Maybe one that’s caused alerts and advisories in nearly half the United States, hundreds of millions of people at risk? One of the first things you’d want to do is post information to your website, maybe update it pretty regularly? I would. The National Weather Service did, too.

Funny thing, though, when lots of people stop by your website, things slow down. When millions of people stop by and pound the refresh key, well, things stop. Kind of like they did for the NWS website during the recent huge snowstorm that buried the Midwest. According to the Washington Post:

The performance issues were linked to “unprecedented demand” on the site’s infrastructure, according to Carey. On Tuesday afternoon, the site was getting 15-20 million hits per hour.

“The traffic was beyond the capacity we have in place. [It] exceeded the week of Snowmageddon.”

The NWS website received 2 billion page views during the week of Snowmageddon, according to Carey. On an average day, he said the website receives an average of about 70 million page views.

The Post article goes into some detail about how poorly designed (and ugly) the NWS site is, as if that was the problem. The real problem, and it’s one we as emergency communicators have, is the server limits. Federal agencies can probably handle the crush better than many, states probably not so much and locals? Not at all.

If something big happened in your jurisdiction, could your web servers handle the crush?All these blog posts I write about how important it is to craft good messages, get them quickly approved, push them out through a variety of methods, and what happens when the big one hits? The server and website slows down to a crawl, or crashes completely.

The solution? Involve IT in your planning. They’re probably already neck-deep in continuity of operations (COOP) or continuity of government (COG) planning, but I’ll bet dollars to donuts that they’re not considering your outreach efforts in their plans. Fix that.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about communications planning for a variety of reasons, almost all of them having to do with crafting new ones and updating old ones. I find that when I start working really hard on some new topic, I begin seeing that topic everywhere.

Serendipitously.

As I’m crafting these plans, I see how someone else has done it, or talk with someone who recently went throughout the same thing, or find amazing resources on the web that end up being exactly what I needed at the time.

So, I’d like to take this opportunity to point you in the direction of two resources that I’ve found extremely useful. And hopefully jog your memory for resources that might help me.

First, Chris Brogan recently posted an article about his recently revamped communication plan. Divided into several parts intend to simulate the steps needed to be addressed for a completely thought out plan, he organized it as such:

1. Build a plan, with attention paid to listening, a home base, outposts, and databases

2. What will you include or, as I like to say, what are your tools or methods

3. What do you think your community needs/wants? Be sure to balance this against your goals.

4. Finally, writing the plan down helps, be sure you can address each of the following, goals, community, new attractions and methods.

The next very useful tool I came across is from PRSA, the Public Relations Society of America. They’ve got this great page buried on their site chock full of PDFs about social media policy development (including PRSA’s policy), PRSA’s style guide and brand management guidance. While this isn’t, “How to write a comms plan,” it’s got tons of clues about structuring your own plan, and things you don’t want to forget. Learn from the best, they say.

And now the caveat. Most of PRSA’s stuff is only for members. And membership is expensive (Props to NPHIC for reasonable membership rates!). Perhaps as a sop to poor family folks like myself, they’re making these documents, and probably others, available for free. All you have to do is sign up for a free MyPRSA login. Yes, they’ll probably sell your information to marketers, but I at least found the downloads useful (which is more than I can say about a lot of things I sign up for). I’ll be sure to let you know if I find anything else useful!

To wrap up, Chris Brogan asked for his community to pitch in ideas about building a comms plan. Most of the comments, unfortunately, were, “Come check out my money for nothing and chicks for free marketing site!” Hopefully you’ve got some great ideas (and yes, emergency comms plans are just as important, and probably written much worse, so your help would be needed), and can pass them along.

I’ve spoken in the past about the need for companies and government agencies to develop positive, empowering social media policies as quickly as possible. In presentations I’ve given, I’ve noted that people in your agency are using social media right now. (Yes, even during work hours. Yes, even though you told them not to, and yes, even though you had IT shut down access to those sites on work computers.)

Many social media policies, though, seem to be little more than, “don’t do personal business on work computers.” I think this is shameful because, for one, it teaches that you feel your employees can’t be trusted. In response, they’ll spend a considerable amount of time trying to get access around your firewall. Barring that, they’ll just access it on their phones. My response to such short-sighted policymaking is to couple a policy to training. You can use social media, but understand that what you say there can be used against the agency, against you. Empower your employees to be ambassadors for your agency.

The second reason I think that myopic policies like those above are wrong are because they completely ignore the other 128 hours in the week. And as should be readily apparent to us all now, social media and the media cycle are now 24/7. What your employees post after-hours can be just as damaging as what they post while at work. And while your agency might be absolved of blame, you still have to deal with the repercussions of the episode (which is why lawyers should not be the only folks writing social media policies).

And now we’re seeing that short-sightedness come to fruition.

Per the Wall Street Journal (and probably every other publication this morning), the National Labor Relations Board has agreed to a settlement between the American Medical Response of Connecticut ambulance service and one of their employees. late last year, the NLRB issued a complaint against the company because they fired an employee after she posted negative comments about the company on her Facebook page.

When the NLRB issued its complaint about the firing last fall, it alleged the firing was illegal because the online posting constituted “protected concerted activity” under the National Labor Relations Act.

That law allows employees to discuss the terms and conditions of their employment with co-workers and others, and the employee involved in the case had posted comments about her supervisor and responded to further comments from her co-workers, the NLRB said.

The NLRB had also alleged the company maintained and enforced overly broad rules in its employee handbook regarding blogging, Internet posting, and communications between employees.

Can you say the same about your company policy? Court watchers and the social media world were keeping a close eye on this case:

The case had become a test of how much latitude employees may have when posting comments about work matters from their home computers on social media sites such as Facebook.

The settlement was almost completely in favor of the complainant:

Under the terms of the settlement approved by the NLRB’s Hartford, Conn., Regional Director Jonathan Kreisberg, the company agreed to revise its rules. The company agreed not to discipline or discharge employees for engaging in discussions about wages and other work issues when not on the job, the NLRB said.

As more and more people make social media a part of their lives, our agencies’ and companies’ policies need to keep pace. If you don’t see everyone standing around the water cooler anymore at the office, that’s because they’re all on Facebook. Are you prepared for what they’re saying?