Author: Jim

Reading back through my posts can be a bit depressing. I implore you to message all the time, using a variety of means, targeting specific groups but all groups, too. I want you to manage multiple online communities as well as, you know, actually do your job. I look at my job and see deadlines extending into the far future, job duties piled on top of job duties, social networks begging to be fed, conferences to attend, email backlogs; well, it can be depressing.

And, as much as we all know that this is no way for someone to live, I’m willing to bet that your own work-life looks strikingly similar to mine. And that depression feels just as real. Fortunately (or unfortunately, based upon how likely it is that you’ll be able to implement these recommendations), a recent interview with a Harvard researcher lays out what this means and what we can do about it:

During an interview, Amabile discussed how the ever-accelerating treadmill lessens creativity. “In the short term, people become less engaged in their work if their creativity isn’t supported,” she said. “They will also be less productive because they often can’t focus on their most important work. In the long term, companies may lose their most talented employees, as well as losing out because they won’t have the innovative products, innovative services, and business models that they need to be competitive.”

…

“Managers and employees need to work together to constantly prioritize, to figure out what is truly important, what they can forget about, and what can they push to the back burner in order to reduce time pressure. My colleague here at HBS, Leslie Perlow, found that, in a department of harried engineers, it was powerful to simply declare ‘quiet time’ in the morning, three days a week: no meetings with or phone calls to colleagues, no interruptions, no expecting immediate responses to emails. People were way more productive. They also felt less stressed and more satisfied with their work.”

Stepping outside of the academic white tower, and out of the gilded towers of the private sector, what does this look like for our lowly government communicator? Well, it’s a lot tougher to do, that’s for sure. We live in an era of government austerity. We’ve been asked to do more with less. And then we’ve had that “less” pared down and refocused. How the heck can we take three hours a week to just think and be creative when we can’t even make it through our forty-plus hours in a week?

The answer is, unfortunately at the beginning, more work. We need to identify where our efforts are most successful. What is it that you do that garners the biggest success? Is it responding to media calls, or blog posting? Is it posting to all of your social media networks, or just the one with the biggest audience? Is it cutting less used social networks or investing in automation tools? Is it fighting your detractors or supporting your supporters? We need to take an honest look at the work that we do and focus on what works. What will work next. Make our “less” be worth more.

How? Take a look at the work that Fairfax County has done to revamp their website. All driven by data and metrics, they’ve streamlined the process and made it easier to update content that’s being used more often, and put other stuff on the backburner. Now they can focus on what their community is looking for, and take a blessed minute to slow down and be creative.

There are tools out there that will allow us to see where we’re successful. Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Tumblr Analytics, and those are just the easy, free ones that I have bookmarked. Once we have a sense of what works and what doesn’t work, maybe we can stop doing what doesn’t work and really, truly, do more with less.

Last week, the New York Times website was down again. This was the second time in two weeks, ostensibly for different reasons, but still, that kind of downtime is simply unacceptable. We’ve talked in the past about what they did the first time the site went down; the second response was very similar (though the second reason, DNS hacking by the Syrian Electronic Army, was much more thorough and shut down the Times’ mobile apps as well), relying on established social media feeds to continue publishing.

We’ve also, in the past, talked about what happened in Calgary, Edmonton during their most recent floods:

[T]he emergency management and social media worlds watched in awe as the official police Twitter account was placed into so-called, “Twitter jail,” for tweeting too much.

…

[W]hat didn’t make it into most of the “Twitter jail” stories was that the City of Calgary’s website was overwhelmed and went down from the traffic crush.

Calgary acted spectacularly during that disaster and so has the New York Times. I hope that we’ve learned from them have multiple layers of fail-over protection ready to go. (Though between me and you, I know that’s a long shot.) But what’s spurred me to write today about this post is something Matthew Keys did during the NY Times hacking:

He wasn’t under any threat at the time, and he didn’t have any reason to be concerned, other than a rumor that Twitter’s main web address may have also been hacked. The service was still functioning regularly, and actually was fine throughout the event. But Mr. Keys depends on 100% uptime for his livelihood and cannot take a chance, so he proactively is posting where people can find him should Twitter go down, or his access disappear. Before it’s troubled, before he’s got to scramble to set something up, just in case.

And his actions leads me to think about our preparations for such an event. Sure, it’s written into the plan, but does anyone who hasn’t read the plan know where they should go? I sort of hinted at this in my Calgary post, but never took the necessary next step that I am today:

The Calgary Police were lucky to have another account they were able to fail over to, Constable Jeremy Shaw’s personal account, but that meant that the public had to find that account to begin receiving the updates again.

Are you prepared to start advertising your dark site, your back-up site or social network, today? Once all hell breaks loose and the site is down and Twitter’s been hacked and no one can hear your messages anymore is probably too late. Do you have pre-approved messages that will go out regularly while your comms are up during a disaster informing folks where to go if they can’t reach you through the normal channels?

So, do your readers know where to get updates when your site crashes? (Or is hacked by Syrian Electronic Army, Anonymous or Occupy.) When are you going to tell them?

As we diversify our communications methods, we’re running into more audiences. I mean, we always used to do that when we were just blasting messages through the big, fat pipe of the mass media, but now the public has admitted that they have feelings and thoughts and preferences. And some of those preferences are counter to the message that we push out. We say things and they’ve been empowered through social media to talk back. To yell back. To “express their constitutional right passionately,” as a friend of mine once said.

In public health, there is a certain segment of the population who doesn’t like what we say. They feel that many of the things public health does encroaches on their rights. From lead remediation to asbestos remediation to fluoridation to vaccines to isolation and quarantine. The anti-vaccine folks tend to be the loudest right now due to a now-disgraced theory that some vaccines can cause autism, but our field has struggled with this type of thing for a while. And I’m sure that it’s pretty much the same story for most government agencies. Police, food safety, schools, hell, government itself, all of us have detractors.

And normally, I’m one to take on those folks head on. Proactive communication, I say. Government agencies should be advocates, I’ve said. But a recent article that Denise Graveline published about your fans:

It’s an approach that can help focus your efforts and your message, not to mention your budget and productivity. As Seth Godin points out, “Instead of working so hard to prove the skeptics wrong, it makes a lot more sense to delight the true believers. They deserve it, after all, and they’re the ones that are going to spread the word for you.”

Should we be actively engaging with those who denigrate us? (I mean, besides the obvious correction of incorrect facts.) Or should we be concentrating on our adoring fans?

The rationale for these questions and which one is more important is exactly the same and it has to do with the ease of viral messages today. We just have to figure out which is more important to us:

Are you more scared of a negative viral message than you are excited about a positive viral message?

We live in an austere world and we need to make real decisions about where we focus our efforts. Should we be playing defense against bad things that someone might say about us that catch social media wildfire and are repeated everywhere? If so, we need to work to minimize the nay-sayers and work to convert them. Or should we be playing offense and trying to seed as many good things in the hopes that some of them catch social media wildfire and are repeated everywhere? If so, we need to identify, groom and make sure that our supporters have everything they need.

This isn’t a decision you or I can make. This is something we as organizations need to make together. What does your executive want to do? Is your comms team set up for defense or public relations? And I don’t know which is better. If you would’ve asked me this question a few days ago, I have no idea what I would’ve said. But I wonder what you think now that I’ve phrased the question this way. I’d love to see your comments below!