Author: Jim

As if you couldn’t tell my excitement for being able to host PIO Marcus Deyerin’s recounting of his response to the I-5 Skagit River Bridge Collapse, I’m going to highlight another of his wonderful posts. This one is all about how he vital social media was to his response that evening and lessons that he learned from being on the ground of a major transportation accident. There are things that everyone can learn from seeing this happen in real life. This was not only the second most commented upon post that I’ve ever had!

Skagit Bridge Collapse Personal Lessons Learned
Marcus Deyerin
PIO
Northwest Washington Incident Management Team

Twitter
Twitter, by far, was the most valuable tool for me to provide information to the public and media. Although I lost my ability to make calls and send SMS messages, I was able to send Twitter messages throughout. However, I was not able to successfully send tweets with a photo attached in those first two hours or so. After my second unsuccessful attempt to send a tweet with a photo, I gave up and decided to focus on text only tweets, since I figured the news helicopters were providing ample visual coverage of the scene.

It was only the next day that I was able to survey my “@ mentions” where I saw several media who were trying to contact me directly. They wanted me to either call them for an interview (which obviously I couldn’t during the first couple of hours), or to follow them on Twitter so they could direct message me. For a single PIO, this is a conundrum, because you want to be available to the media and Twitter isn’t a bad platform for that, but trying to monitor the huge volume of traffic directed toward you in those early moments is close to impossible. This is where a virtual operation support team (VOST) could really be useful. I’ll talk more about how I could/should have utilized VOST in a section below.

A couple people have observed and questioned the wisdom in regards to me tweeting in an official capacity from my personal account – most notable among them Gerald Baron. I am in total agreement with Gerald that this was not ideal, and it’s not something I would want to do again. Here’s why it happened… the Twitter account (@NWIMT) for the regional incident management team I’m on is what I should have used. Unfortunately, my day-job home agency transitioned to a new email system last week, which subsequently required reconfiguring my mobile device (which wiped my Twitter account info). That occurred on Tuesday – and I simply hadn’t re-added the NWIMT account to my phone’s Twitter client. When I attempted to re-add it at the scene, I couldn’t remember the account password, so I just had to go with what I had – which was my personal Twitter account.

I offer the above not as an excuse, but rather explanation. The obvious lesson here is if you rely on a particularly critical tool for something, you can’t wait even a “few days” to get it back in place. Having said that, we all live in the real world, and that kind of thing is just going to happen. My personal account is the tool I had available to me, and again – while not ideal – it served the purpose of getting the information out during the critical period when timeliness was everything. In a crisis situation, flexibility and adaptability are key; and good now is better than perfect later.

Personal lessons learned:

• Twitter reigned as the superior tool for getting information out rapidly to a broad audience. [Note to Twitter – please, please don’t do anything vis-a-vis your API or business model to mess this up for those of us in the emergency management field.]
• Twitter worked when phone and SMS didn’t. That won’t be true in every situation, but it was interesting nevertheless.
• Photos attached to tweets are great – but may not always work in a constrained data flow environment
• Once the media calls started coming in, I was no longer able to tweet. If I need to do this again, I’ll direct media calls to a different phone I have, so I can take calls on one phone and use the other phone for tweets / social media
• If you’re sending tweets with time-sensitive info, add your own time stamp (e.g. 1015hrs). I remembered the value of this about half-way through my own efforts
• The public doesn’t care about “official” titles – they value the quality of the information being provided. That’s not to suggest we in official roles shouldn’t care about which account we use; but we do need to understand that the audience will go where the best information is coming from – so if you want to be the official and best source – then you better be providing the best information.

VOST
I had a couple of emergency management colleagues contact me through Twitter to see if there was anything they could do to help from afar. I want to extend my appreciation to those folks (you know who you are).

This concept of “digital support” enabled by technology is increasingly being utilized around the county and the world, and is known as a Virtual Operations Support Team. It’s already been explained and highlighted elsewhere by others far better than I ever could [<– Jim – maybe link to other blog posts about this?]. When that support was offered to me, I didn't have the wherewithal to know what kind of assistance to request. But now with the benefit of retrospect, here's what I should have asked for:

• Monitor my Twitter @ mentions for media contact requests. I simply didn’t have time to check @ mentions, and then subsequently filter out media requests / questions from the overall stream of retweets. The VOST could compile and forward the relevant ones to me via email, which I could then either respond to directly, or forward to the appropriate agency specific PIO.
• Monitor overall social media and traditional media coverage. What questions do people have that aren’t being effectively answered? Are there rumors or mis-information we need to address?
• Establish and populate an incident specific website. In a multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional response, this is perhaps the single biggest need during the early hours of the incident, but also the biggest challenge. It’s easy enough to populate the content quickly, but you have to have an existing website place (or dark site ready to go), and on a server robust enough to handle the surge of traffic you’re likely to receive.
• Help build a media cheat-sheet. On Friday morning my second task was to put together an Agency Point of Contact sheet for the media. I noticed a lot of reporters were asking the right questions of the wrong people, if for no other reason than because they weren’t entirely sure which agency had purview over a given subject. I listed every stakeholder agency involved, the POC and contact info, and the topics or issues for which that agency was the most qualified to answer. After the 12:30pm briefing on Friday, I handed this out to media and they seemed to really appreciate it. It would have been really helpful to have this at least started the night before.

I know there’s more a VOST could have probably helped with, but these are the things that stick out in my rearview mirror. While there are a number of excellent established VOST organizations out there, this is definitely a capability we’ll be looking to develop further within the IMT I serve on.

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Tomorrow we’ll have Marcus back for an overview of his dealing with the media and coordinating with other agency PIOs. Stay tuned!

If you’ve ever seen my Twitter account when I’m at a conference, you most assuredly knew about. I tweet about everything I learn. I see it as my responsibility to shout what I learn as loud as I can so everyone else gets the opportunity to learn. I’ve been known to kind-of take over conference hashtags. And yet, I still get the stinkeye from folks who think that I’m messing around on my phone. So I wanted to post on it and see what this community thought about it. And the response was amazing! I got the most comments ever to one of my posts! Check it out below and be sure to join the conversation!

I’m very lucky to get the opportunity to attend a number of conferences, both because of my speaking engagements and because I work in an active region that regularly holds opportunities for learning for members of the emergency response community. And I know that I’m lucky, so I take every opportunity to attend these conferences and trainings and do my best to share what I’ve learned as widely as I can because I know that not everyone is as lucky as I am, but they still have the need to learn about these topics.

And sometimes that can be problematic. You see, after the conference or training, I have to go back to work and back to blogging and back to my family and life. I don’t have the time repackage and redistribute this information. So I do it in real time via Twitter. And that’s problematic because I’m usually staring at my phone or tablet and typing furiously.

Think of the last time you were in a conference and saw someone pounding away at their BlackBerry. What did you think they were doing? Did you roll your eyes and wonder why they even came to the conference? Yep, that was me livetweeting.

Livetweeting. Hearing what’s being presented, digesting it, repackaging it to Twitter length, typing it up on a tiny phone screen, adding a hashtag (sometimes adding pictures) and posting it. And doing it quickly enough that I can accurately represent what’s being said and being sure to get all of the really good parts. So not only am I not not paying attention, I’m probably paying more attention than many of the glassy-eyed folks who gets the the benefit of the doubt with regards to “paying attention.”

And I’m not the only one that does this, in fact, the younger your audience the more likely they’ll be devoting time during presentations to digital devices. So what does that mean for, in each of the three roles you fulfill around presentations: as speaker, as a member of the audience, as someone who is not even at the conference.

First, as someone in the audience, this should be easy to deal with. The person sitting next to you tweeting away has identified themselves as someone who is a) taking lots of notes and b) very happy to share it. Say hi. Give them your card. Ask where you can find their notes and if you can download them. (And if they’ve just been playing Plants vs. Zombies for the last hour, they’ll totally be shamed into paying attention during the next session.) Voilà! Instant notes and a new colleague.

As a speaker, here you might need make some changes, but all of them are positive. First, every recommendation about how to improve presentations you’ll find talks about presenting less information on slides and focusing the content. This helps your livetweeters get the gist of the slide more quickly, but it will also helps your non-tweeting audience digest and integrate your presentation. One idea per slide. Plain language. Descriptive images. Your livetweeters will love you, your audience will love you and you’ll be a better presenter.

The second great reason speakers should embrace social media is all for them, they’ve got the opportunity to get real, free, unfiltered immediate feedback on their presentation. Sure it’s difficult to see it while you’re presenting (even I haven’t mastered that–yet), but if your audience all used a hashtag (maybe one that you recommended to them) think of how easy it would be to collect all of those notes into one place. What a great repository of real-time feedback on your performance, kudos you’ve received and a contact list of folks who were interested in your topic enough to come and listen to you.

As an outside observer, people using social media conferences is simply the bee’s knees. You’ve got the world at your fingertips, all you need to do is follow along. Look for the announced hashtag for the conference you find most interesting and check it out to see if anyone is tweeting during the conference! If you’re stuck for topics to follow, check out the Healthcare Hashtag Project, where folks register conference hashtags and help get a transcription of them.

The reason I bring this topic up is because of a conference I recently attended. The conference was actively advertising their hashtag and having their staff livetweet vociferously. And yet there were still complaints from folks in the audience deriding those on their phones. Which I think is a shame, for all of the potential good reasons above. What do you think about livetweeting and using social media during conferences? (And I’d love to know if you hate it!)

EDIT: someone did an academic research study on this! (PDF)

I had been planning to write about how I dislike how governments seem to have an over-dependence on campaign-based communications. Last year, I got the perfect opportunity when a great friend, Alex Bornkessel, posted something on exactly that topic. I thought it would be a simple post, but then my great British friends took over and have regularly flogged it to the top of my posts.

But it didn’t stop there. The incomparable Emma Rodgers posted a response a few months ago that didn’t exactly agree with me, and she makes some great points. Definitely be sure to read mine AND hers, found here.

When I started this Your Audience is a Lie thing, I was hoping to parlay it into a nice little series. Unfortunately, before I could finish it with my bold prediction of what your jobs as government communicators will look like in a few years, one of the smartest and most dedicated people I know in health communications beat me to the punch. Alex Bornkessel, who runs an amazing MS charity with her family, called for death to the campaign this past weekend and I couldn’t agree more.

This idea that campaign-focused communications actively works against our goals of affecting real change (whether it be health-focused, preparedness-focused, or some other goal) in two different ways. First, it assumes that our audience is there, available, placid and interested, during the time we decide they should hear our messages. If they are otherwise ready to lose weight, or set up a communications plan, or change the batteries in their smoke detectors, except for some family crisis that happens during our predefined “campaign time,” then they don’t get the message that they need to change their behavior. (This is a HUGE reason I despise days, weeks and months that celebrate or raise awareness for something; what, tuberculosis doesn’t matter the other 364 days of the year?)

The other reason only communicating through campaigns is harmful is, in my estimation, infinitely worse. Say your timing works out and you get lucky and actually find someone who was patiently waiting for your message. Not only that, but the message is specifically tailored to the group she self-identifies with (because you’re still marketing to audiences and not everyone), and she takes action on it. She’s moved from Contemplation to Preparation based solely on your messaging. Congratulations! But, what happens when you end your campaign? Specifically, what happens to this wonderful person that you’ve prepped to be ready to move forward and actually change her behavior? Does she not move to the Action stage? Does she resent your messaging for leaving her hanging, alone? Is she willing to wait another year for you to become interested in her problem again? Will she even listen next time?

Alex puts the problem into specific relief here, and even offers the solution we’ve been talking about:

Traditional mass media models that follow TV PSAs, direct mail, radio announcements and the like allow us to safely distance ourselves from the nitty-gritty hard work of transforming our world. It puts us a hands distance from actually interacting with and serving our people. It’s time to roll up our sleeves.

Our work is no longer about building a one-and-done campaign, but about creating shared experiences and building movements. To build bridges, we have to walk side-by-side with those we want to not only reach, but truly engage.

Her post is called Shifting from Campaign to Cause, which is sublime in it’s understanding of the problem. If we really want to affect change, we have to believe that our message is good enough for everyone, whenever they are ready to hear it, and understand that they’ll have questions and concerns and complaints and praise, and that it’s part of our job to find those comments and questions important and valid and respond to them.

Honestly, if we’re not invested enough in our work to do that, why are we even messaging?