Author: Jim

Earlier this year, London experienced an horrific situation, where two men brutally murdered another with a machete. Just the description of the event is traumatic enough, but this attack was made all the more real by how it unfolded on social media. Akin to what happens during most disasters today, the attack was livetweeted by a bystander.

What the what? How does… What goes through people’s heads?! Why, in the face of death and destruction, do people feel the need to share these horrible situations? I mean, you can make a case in some disaster situations that social sharing of pictures and descriptions serves some public good: informing people further away about their families, updating emergency responders on the scope of the situation, providing warning on a developing and evolving situation. But a singular attack? TechCrunch asked a similar question after the Asiana Airlines crash earlier this year, too:

Right now, we are rubbernecking on a global level. Good news goes unheard as we fall into an eager chorus of shock and sorrow. Each of us has a choice of whether to simply parrot the problems our world inevitably faces or use our voice to try to solve them. Let’s think before we tweet.

The post is titled, Why Do We Endlessly Retweet Tragedy?, and the question is a good one. Why do we do this? What causes people to let everyone in on this terrible secret that they’ve witnessed? There is some research on why that might be. The situation isn’t completely analogous, but you have to wonder if disastrous shows, like Breaking Bad cause similar feelings. Why do we watch them? Why would we revel in the downfall of a science teacher into a meth kingpin? Scientific American explores the theories:

We often associate words like ‘fun,’ ‘enjoyment,’ or ‘escape’ when we think about our entertainment. These are all hedonic, or pleasurable, rewards of watching TV. But the work of Mary Beth Oliver, a professor of media studies at Pennsylvania State University, has shown us that entertainment can offer more than enjoyment. In step with the positive psychology movement, Oliver and her colleagues have identified many eudaimonic rewards of watching depressing, stressful, or even horrific television. Eudaimonia is an experience that meaningfulness, insight, and emotions that put us in touch with our own humanity. Eudaimonia might not make us happy, but it can enrich us, leave us feeling fulfilled, touched, and perhaps even teach us something about ourselves.

Tragedy is a deeply profound experience, and one that has the potential to affect each person for the rest of their lives. Given the humdrum of modern society, that excitement, that explosion of grief, fear and stress can be cathartic and allow us to feel more deeply, live more. To appreciate life. We share because we are alive, because we are feeling something greater than any other day. And if that’s true, there is nothing wrong with it. It’s a natural human reaction that is tied completely to emotions and deep brain functions.

So, what does that mean for us as communicators? It means that as much as we’d like to tell people to stop taking pictures, think before you tweet, stop making the situation worse, the public can’t. They are experiencing life–the bad part, yes, but still–they are alive and bursting at the seams with emotion and fear and dread and being able to talk about it is key to bouncing back from it. From being resilient. From recovering.

So when that next disaster happens, save your messages for what you’re best at and stop chastising the public for doing what might be in their best interest.

Congratulations! You’ve finally reached the pinnacle of government social media success: you got your executive to start blogging! So what’s next? Well, it really depends on the blog. How good is it? Chances are, it’s probably not that interesting. Like most executive blogs. Dannielle Blumenthal writes on Govloop.com that there are seven assumptions that lead to bad leaderhips blogging:

1. Communications is not important, the work is
2. If we do communicate, we’re talking to our “primary audiences”
3. Senior executives have to sound important
4. All negativity is bad
5. People hear from us so rarely that we can pretty much write whatever we want and it’s all good
6. Silence is usually golden
7. Even if we did care about blogging, you can’t prove what a good one is

Ms. Blumenthal gives some suggestions about how to cure boring executive posts, but that’s really all about fixing one particular blog by one particular person. We should be looking bigger and seeing how we can improve all of the work that we publish. And the folks at Buffer think that one way to do that is to develop a content style guide:

Consistency in style, tone, grammar, and punctuation is essential to an enjoyable blog experience. Successfully done, these elements go unnoticed by readers who are too busy consuming the easy, breezy content. That’s the way it should be. Style guides create uniform content and allow that content to shine.

Having trouble figuring out how to set one up? The blog also has recommendations for how to get started:

The key to keeping the length reasonable is to find an existing editorial style guide that covers the basics—a guide like the AP Style Guide or the Chicago Manual of Style. These guides are exhaustive in their coverage of grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and word usage.

Once you have this foundation, your content style guide is free to cover only the additions or changes. There is no need to repeat anything that is in the original guide.

Once you’ve got that set, why leave all of the goodness of your newly very-readable blog to just your executive? In other words, don’t just depend on your executive to blog, look to your experts, too. The utterly amazing Helen Reynolds gives us five reasons we’ll benefit from letting our staff blog:

1. Your brand ain’t your logo (ed. note: It’s your people)
2. People trust people (ed. note: Not press releases and corporate speak)
3. Experts need experts (ed. note: Your staff can learn from other experts more easily)
4. They’re probably doing it already (key sentence: But employees – experts – will be using social media to research, learn and share: they just won’t put your organisation’s name to it, or they’ll do it without identifying themselves.)
5. PR and social media ‘gurus’ (ed. note: PR should be helping our experts to communicate well, not communicating for them)

So, what do you think? Your executive blog might not be the coolest thing on the block anymore. But, that’s okay, because it’s a great start. How else will you get your executive’s approval for more multiple social media outlets?

What happens if you have an emergency, and no one notices? Did it really happen? We’ve talked about that before, but in the context of multiple disasters happening simultaneously and the competition for the scarce resource of media coverage:

The reporter then went to Moscow, Ohio to cover another [tornado] touchdown. Even with that, the big story was out of Henryville, where the devastation was greatest. Never heard about Moscow, either, did you? According to the reporter, the media wasn’t given access until several days later.

Who told their story? Did not telling their story affect how they recovered? Did it affect the funding that came their way?

That situation makes some sense, though. When there is plenty of devastation to go around, the juiciest story usually will get the coverage. But what if you have a terrible disaster–HUGE disaster–and no one from the mass media covers it? Because it happens. And it’s happened recently:

The worst blizzard in recorded history of South Dakota just swept through the state. Tens of thousands of cattle are predicted dead and the much of the state is still without power. The Rapid City Journal reports, ”Tens of thousands of cattle lie dead across South Dakota on Monday following a blizzard that could become one of the most costly in the history of the state’s agriculture industry.”

The only reason I know this is because my parent’s ranch, the setting for Meadowlark, lies in the storm’s epicenter. Mom texted me after the storm. “No electricity. Saving power on phone. It’s really, really bad….” She turned on her phone to call me later that day. “There are no words to describe the devastation and loss. Everywhere we look there are dead cattle. I’ve never seen so many dead cattle. Nobody can remember anything like this.”

The post goes on to talk about why this was such a devastating event and why it will probably never make the national news. It didn’t damage facilities, it was far out in (what is sometimes termed by us East Coasters as) a flyover state, the human toll was basically zero and the economic effect won’t be seen for months (in the name of higher beef prices). Is there anything that would be a huge hardship to your organization or agency or county or town or state, but nobody else would understand? How would the response go? Would there be any Red Cross text message donation campaigns? Would the President grieve for your loss on evening TV? Probably not, and yet the damage could be just as great.

So, what do we do? As emergency communicators, does it makes sense to try to raise awareness of your disaster? Is that self-serving? (Probably.) Might it still help anyways? (Maybe.) How would you do it without sounding whiny? (I haven’t the foggiest idea.) In turn, I ask you. What would you do if your disaster, your community’s suffering, was completely unheard of by the larger public?