Author: Jim

For those of us addicted to football (American football, my overseas friends), the current season has been tough to deal with. Due to a contract issue, the National Football League has locked their referees out and have installed replacement refs to adjudicate the games.

The results have been, as anticipated, not pretty. At the end of this week’s Monday night game (for my football fans that’s typically the biggest game of the week), the Seattle Seahawks quarterback heaved a pass to the end zone, hoping to score on the final play and win the game. A Green Bay Packers player seemingly came down with the ball, which was then wrestled away by a Seahawks player. One of the replacement referees called the play a touchdown, another called it an interception. In either case, the game was over, and who won was contingent upon the referees call.

The refs ruled that the Seahawks won. The social media world subsequently exploded.

A number of Green Bay Packers players tweeted their displeasure.

You can see in the picture above how, after midnight on the East Coast, how large of a response that event generated. The reason I post on this is the following line in a TechCrunch article posted this afternoon:

[T]he point is that NFL players took to Twitter first to voice their displeasure, rather than talking to mainstream press on camera. The tide has changed for how people communicate, and this is a perfect example.

I think that anyone who has been paying attention to crisis communications has seen this shift taking place. It’s just really nice to see that in stark terms (with pictures!) on a topic that a wide majority of Americans are interested in.

Update from Heather Brink (devoted Packers fan): According to the Twitter blog, the play in question generated more than one million tweets, and TJ Lang (the most vociferous tweeter in this matter) had more than 150,000 retweets himself. Truly viral.

I’ve been a big fan of the CDC’s Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication curriculum for a number of years. I even flew down to Atlanta once to get real, hands-on training on it. Developed in the aftermath of 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks, the CDC gathered many of the smartest, most intelligent people in the fields of crisis communications and risk communication and banged on the problem of how to push out life saving information in, essentially, no time. What came out on the other side was as close to cutting edge as you could get. And it held up pretty well, too. The lessons didn’t require much tweaking but over time, especially in today’s five-second news cycle, it needed a rewrite.

And now they’ve finally published the 2012 version. (PDF download)

I’ll be in Washington next week to receive the inaugural training, so keep an eye out for my livetweets from the NPHIC Symposium. In the meantime, check out some of the other amazing tools on CERC that the CDC offers, including archived webinars, training modules and best practice reports.

I’m constantly amazed by how reporters are rewriting how their field uses social media. I’ve talked about it before, about reporters using Twitter to find sources for breaking news. Scary, I know.

But they’re no longer integrating Twitter into their daily routines by themselves anymore. Twitter recently hired Mark Luckie as Manager of Journalism and News, and within the last week or so, he made a number of recommendations for reporters on how to use Twitter more effectively. This is important not only because it shows how much Twitter has become a primary tool for the media today, but because, well, those recommendations are useful for us, too.

Lauren Indvik from Mashable summarized the best points for us, but check out the full article for more:

Tweet your beat
Don’t only post your own stories
Live-tweet events
Use hashtags
Use @mentions
Use the re-tweet button

I have to say, I agreed wholeheartedly with all of the recommendations, except the last one. I’ve always tried to add my name or spin to tweets, but it looks like for just passing along info, a quick retweet might be all we need.

Here’s Ms. Indvik’s note on that (and remember, this is coming directly from Twitter):

Tweets that are re-tweeted in full using the automatic Retweet button are retweeted three times as often compared to tweets that are quoted.