Author: Jim

Crazy weather seems to be par for the course these days. From record-breaking rainfall in the Mid-Atlantic, to record-breaking heat in the West, to record-breaking tornadoes, things just ain’t right.

But none of them have shown the devastation that’s just now clearing up after catastrophic flooding in Alberta, Canada, especially the images coming out of Calgary, shown above.

About a week ago, the 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. “Twitter jail” is a term used to describe the automatic, time-limited suspension of Twitter accounts when they post too often and the service’s algorithms think they might be spamming.

If you’ve never had this happen to you, you can imagine how frustrating it would be to have potentially life-saving information, and requests for that information, and be unable to give it out. 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.

What would your agency do in that situation? You’ve got a disaster unfolding seemingly everywhere at once, and one of your primary means for information distribution is unusable for an indeterminate period of time. If you haven’t considered that was a possibility, now is a good time to.

So let’s say you take the advice of most of the social media experts and have backup accounts at the ready. Good for you, but how are you going to let your publics know about them? If you said, “we’ll update our website,” good on you, that’s a great idea!

But what 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. So, there goes that plan.

And it’s not like this is a new type of problem. A quick Google search for “government website overwhelmed” brings up dozens of examples of the information seeking publics beating information providers (read: our websites) into submission. The example that sticks out to me is the FBI’s website crashing mere minutes after releasing the Boston Marathon bombing suspects images back in April. Not only did that delay circulation of the suspect’s images, but it also happened at the same time that the FBI released information on the ricin letter mailings (which was what I as looking for).

We continue to think–for some reason–that our government purchased servers can handle today’s information seeking public. Our plans say to post critical, life-saving information on our websites as if that’s a solution. We conveniently ignore example after example of this type of hubris exploding in our faces. And in today’s world, buying more servers simply isn’t the answer.

So, here’s my answer: get ready to set up a blog. That’s right, a third-party blog might be your solution. Companies like WordPress.com, Google’s Blogger, Squarespace, among others, are all designed to host content for millions of viewers. They buy bandwidth by the terabyte. And they’re in a race to prove that they’ve got the highest percentage of uptime. They will not crash.

So I’ve updated our response plans to include the possibility of setting up an incident-specific blog on my host of choice to ensure a steady, regular, and available means of releasing information during the incident. Our website will direct people to that blog, as will all of our social media accounts. If one of our Twitter accounts gets thrown into jail, the blog will note the new Twitter account. Just because it doesn’t end in “.gov” doesn’t mean people won’t trust it. When they’re searching for life-saving information, they’ll take it from whomever is talking. And when your website goes down, you’re no longer talking.

EDIT: I just want to clarify something before it gets out of hand, I’m not saying that the folks in Calgary did anything wrong. If that happened here in Philly, I only WISH that we’d deal with it as successfully as the response staff, the City and the police did in Calgary. Their communications protocols are the gold standard, and everything I recommend in this article is taken almost word-for-word from their playbook. My intention was simply to note that “Twitter jail” is not the story here, unlike what most other emergency management and social media blogs posted on.

This should be an easy one, right? You’re a Public Information Officer. You organize press events. You even know about your agency’s translation services. So what do you do when you include members of the deaf and hard of hearing communities in your live messaging? You call in a sign language translator (ASL here in the states, BSL in the old country).

Dust off hands, next problem. Right? Well, not exactly.

You see, I run a sometimes regular Twitterchat on using social media in public health (#sm4ph) and our last chat was all about reaching special, vulnerable and other traditionally under-represented populations using social media. And we had an absolute rock star join us, Neil McDevitt. Neil used to work at FEMA and is now the Executive Director of the Deaf-Hearing Communication Centre. Neil was impressed by the ASL interpreter in New York City during Sandy (Hi Lydia!), less so by the ASL interpretation services done by the Pennsylvania folks. His reasoning?

https://twitter.com/NeilMcD/status/349598218058866688

Both places had the right idea, but the implementation is where the problem came in. Think of that single small recommendation, telling the camera folks to be sure to stay wide shot to get the ASL interpreter. How much further could Pennsylvania’s message have made it? It’s a subtle thing, but something we as seasoned PIOs should know about and take into account.

Of course, as great a job as Lydia did, the bar was recently raised with regards to ASL interpreters. A woman named “Holly” nearly stole the show at this year’s Bonnaroo music festival, signing along with Wu-Tang Clan, among others.

Yesterday we talked about best practices for working with the media via social media. But the first step in being able to reach out to them is to know where they are. The problem is that there’s a lot of them and they can be tough to find. Just look at your existing media list. You’ve probably got hundreds of phones numbers and emails listed. And how much time do you take managing that list. Hours and hours.

And now I’m telling you that you need another field in that database, just for social media contact information. It’s a wonder you read my stuff at all.

But there are ways to streamline collecting that information. When I wrote about this last time, I recommended using the website MuckRack.com to collect information on local reporters that have signed up. While there is a subscription that you can sign up for, poor folks like me who aren’t lead media folks probably shouldn’t, as it doesn’t make sense to subscribe. But, with a bit of elbow grease and a few hours of copy/paste, you can put together a pretty good Twitter list. (Shoot me a message if you want to learn how I did it.)

But there might be an easier way. I just recently learned that one of our local newspapers, the Inquirer, has put together a page of all of their Twitter accounts. And it’s awesome. You want to know what the Inky is writing about these days? Want to know what scoop they’re looking for? You can see it all just by going through that page once and saving them all to a list.

Frankly, I wish more news organizations would do this. Frankly-ier (?), I wish more governments would do this. Have a list of all of your subject matter experts Twitter accounts. All of the different official agency accounts. Maybe a list of all of the official PIO accounts? I’d love to know if you know of any agency or government that’s got something like this. If you know of one, definitely reach out to me, or comment below, I’d love to get in touch with them.