Author: Jim

For those of you who follow my public health memes Tumblr, you know I’m not a big fan of the newest The View host, Jenny McCarthy. But I’m just me, railing against the wind. But there are lots of other folks in the public health world that agree with me. But they’re just themselves. Other than our collective power, we can’t make much of a difference.

But what if someone from the government said something?

Psh, we’d never do that, right? We’re the government and we don’t get into tiffs with celebrities with more star-power than everyone in our agency.

But what if…

It turns out that Toronto Public Health is making that move. And why?

Because it’s the right thing to do. Because we, in government, hold views. Spend millions of taxpayer dollars and thousands of hours of time espousing those views. Should we stand back and allow pop culture out-muscle our work? Now, of course, I’m not saying that we shut anyone down. But why shouldn’t we address our detractors? Why shouldn’t we let our points of view stand in the same arena explicitly?

But we don’t. Why?

I think it’s because we, in government, operate under an old paradigm. We operate under the assumption that people listen to the words that we say because we’re the government, and that is all the reason they need. Unfortunately, that’s not the way the world works.

We live in a meritocracy of ideas. In the cacophony of information, the public receives and measures information, then metes out their interest according to how they see the information they’ve received. Interesting, relevant, fun? Get more. Boring, staid, irrelevant? Ignore.

Jenny McCarthy is sexy, bombastic and has legions of followers. Should your public get their public health from her or us? Then why aren’t we doing something about it?

We’ve already established that your agency has a brand. (Take your fingers out of your ears, it doesn’t help the situation.) Last time we talked about this, the thrust was about how others viewed your agency. How the community views the work that you do.

But honestly, branding is about way more than that. Branding is about your employees. It’s about having them understand why they’re doing what they do. It can help give them a reason besides a paycheck to take pride in their work. We all have employees that we know aren’t invested in our mission, but one has to ask: do they even know what the mission is? If they don’t buy in, is that really their fault? Or is it ours for focusing on their individual task and not linking them to the grander goal?

Each of the presenters in the session talked about this, employee satisfaction and buy-in, as a key element–a key goal–of the re-branding process. One of the presenters did an extensive employee survey and used what they learned there as a driving force for the campaign. One of the key findings was:

Staff identify with program not organization

Now think about your agency. Do you have staff that identify as members of a specific program? Or do they proudly state that they’re part of the Department? Each one of those persons isn’t doing damage, but if you’ve got a couple hundred people in your Department and they’re divided up into ten different programs, your power for advocating for change is greatly diminished. Besides which, how can you be part of something bigger if there are only a dozen people in your program?

I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that we live in a time of austerity, where every dollar is accounted for and balanced against some competing priority. Employees are your ambassadors, and if they’re only advocating for their small piece of the pie, is the rest of your Department suffering?

So yesterday, the Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton, had a baby. In case you didn’t notice. The Royal Baby, it was called by the Twitterati. And I’m not a fan. Royal baby, you hold no sway over me. But I can’t get away from him.

But I have solutions. I don’t really follow pop-culture following folks (death, disease and disaster all the time, baby!), I skip over news stories about the newborn babe, my RSS feed is delightfully tech-heavy. But he still mocks me, and lots of other people who couldn’t care less.

In fact, the Guardian even created this handy little tool to wipe the royal family and all of their baby-having ways off of the paper:

[A] small toggle near the top of the page that allows readers to switch between “Royalist” and “Republican” modes, the latter of which removes all reference to English royalty and their familial expansion.

My reason for bringing this up is it demonstrates what the future of news delivery and consumption looks like. Ten years ago the future king would’ve taken the front page of every major American and British newspaper and been the lead on every major newscast. You couldn’t have escaped it. But not today. Today there are people who are in touch and follow news who have no idea this is happening. They’ve successfully filtered their news to only be about those things that are most important to them, and nothing else.

This has huge ramifications for us in emergency communications. “Just put it on the news,” may not be the solution anymore. Not everyone looks at your news, not everyone follows your news. They follow the news that is important to them, and we’ve got to figure out how to access those networks.

The second point this raises is that we’ve been given a great opportunity. Most government communicators have a pipeline, wherein things get approved and shipped out into the world. One method of distribution. Everything in the same packaging. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Technology has advanced in such a way that we can divide, repackage, slice up and otherwise make available in dozens of formats all of our information. Dynamic tagging, specialized social media accounts, website target audiences, path mapping, the list goes on and on. But how many of us actually use these tools? How many of us allow our publics to choose which of our information they feel is important? Or do we force them to sit through everything?