Author: Jim

And this is what our twelve-day journey has led to. My special holiday
treat to you: The Commissioner of the City of Chicago Department of
Public Health.

My reasons for asking Commissioner Dr. Bechara Choucair to participate
in our 12DaysofSMEM project are simple. I feel that the biggest
impediment to wider acceptance and implementation of social media in
public health is simply lack of buy-in by our Executives. Dr.
Choucair has taken to using social media more than most social media
experts so I think this isn’t a problem for him.
Twitter.
LinkedIn.
Facebook.
Google+. Instagram
(can’t find a link, but this is my favorite thing Dr. Choucair does
online).

If, by his his posting here, just one more Executive decides to
explore the use of social media, this entire exercise, these hours of
research and writing, will be worth it. If one more Executive sees how
easy it is, the wide range of benefits, the why, then we’ll have
succeeded.

What do I mean by succeeded, you ask? As I’ve said many times before,
successful messaging, indeed successful emergency response, is
predicated on pre-established and well-greased communication pathways.
Dr. Choucair understands that and is working his thumbs off building
those connections. I can only hope this very best practice finds its
way to other cities and states.

Dr. Choucair, thank you kindly, and the floor is yours:

I have personally been using social media to promote our public health
priorities since my appointment as Commissioner of the Chicago
Department of Public Health in December of 2009. It’s a great tool to
reach individuals across all demographics. This is especially
important for a city as large and diverse as ours. As a Department we
started actively using social media to promote our priorities in July
of 2011 with the use of
Facebook. We launched
Twitter on August 16, 2011,
the same day we released Healthy Chicago, our citywide public health
plan with a vision of making Chicago the healthiest city in the
nation. Both of these efforts were initiated as part of the education
and public awareness strategy of Healthy
Chicago.
We knew then that it was an important communication tool and a few
months later we don’t know how we ever managed without it!

Social media should absolutely be a component of every public
information emergency response plan. Nowadays more and more people are
getting their news in real time 140 characters at a time. From a
public health perspective this is a double edged sword. When the
message is accurate it’s a great way to communicate up to the second
information of events as they unfold. However, when the information is
inaccurate getting the right information out can be a nightmare.
That’s why it’s extremely important that every message we put out is
accurate and that we are constantly monitoring for inaccurate
information.

As I’m sure your readers are aware, responding to a public health
emergency is city-wide response. That’s why our next step in the
evolution of our social media efforts is to continue improve our
coordination efforts with all our City departments as well as with
other government agencies and the private sector. Over the next few
months we are planning some dynamic changes to how we use social media
as a City during an emergency. Look out for the announcement of some
new tools soon.
~fin~

I need to take one moment to sincerely thank Dr. Choucair and Deputy
Commissioner Jose Muñoz for
their quick response to my request and willingness to work with my
deadline. They are both professionals in the truest sense of the word
and provide us all with a goal to strive towards. Thank you again.

(Getting away from public health today; sue me.)

About six months ago, I had the unique pleasure of being invited to
participate in the 2011 NEMA Mid-year Conference’s Social Media in
Emergency Management workshop. I was a last minute addition and
struggled to find passage down to Washington. (Big shout out to my
good friend, James Hamilton, for
the ride.)

The morning was just starting when we walked in the door, and looking
around the room it was like a Who’s Who of Social Media in Emergency
Management. So many of my heroes in one place. Heather
Blanchard. Pascal
Schuback. Sara Estes
Cohen. Jeff
Phillips. Greg
Licamele. Joel
Arnwine. Dawn
Dawson. Christine
Thompson. A dozen, two dozen,
others that made that day the amazing success it was. (If you haven’t
already, read the
report).

But the best part of that day is that the momentum hasn’t stopped. If
anything, it’s sped up. We’re all now barrelling toward the future,
steered by some of the greatest minds in emergency management. Like
Kim Stephens. And Patrice
Cloutier. My compadres.

Earlier this fall, the three of us got together and came up with this
little project. Let’s do something similar to the 30 Days, 30 Ways
campaign that was so successful this
past September. But it’ll all be inside baseball, written for
emergency managers about best practices, true rockstars and where the
field is going. We each chose our own, and our own format (I’m no
machine like Patrice is. 25 days of this would’ve killed me, I’m
sure.)

And wow. What an amazing set of lists. Frankly, I expected more
overlap between our lists, but there is just so much good stuff out
there. Next year we’re going to have to set some kind of bar for
inclusion on these lists. (Klout score, maybe? =P)

And with that, onto the good stuff.

Kim Stephens is a contractor that has advised emergency managers,
cities, counties, states and agencies on the East Coast. She
brought the exceptionally well-done and always popular SMEMChat to its
current weekly schedule. An expert in social media use in higher
education, she’s helping to make sure all of those kids that will take
our jobs and do them better than we ever could imagine are safe. A
devoted wife and mother, she also takes amazing care of me and Patrice
and is always ready with a helpful and thoughtful comment. And in her
ten free minutes per day, Kim writes the exceedingly excellent
iDisaster 2.0 blog. This must-read
blog scans the entire world for examples of best practices, lessons
learned and interesting initiatives that deserve a further look. Her
posts on the Queensland
floods
this year brought to the attention of the SMEM community what was a
truly world-changing social media campaign and deserves to be read.

I think of Kim in two ways. One, she is a true thought-leader and is
leading the emergency management community into a future in which
we’re all safer and more ready. Two, she’s a dear friend. I don’t know
which is more important to me.

And then there’s our neighbor from the Great White North. Patrice
Cloutier is the Team Lead of the Strategic Communications Unit at the
Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services.
Patrice’s specialty is emergency and crisis communication, but he
started on the other side of the camera as a reporter for the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation. So, when he tells you how to react and
interact with a reporter, he speaks from experience. As someone else
that writes about emergency public information, I’d be lying if I
didn’t tell you I regularly check the archives of his Crisis Comms
Command Post blog to make sure
Patrice hasn’t already covered a topic better than I can. To continue
his list of ongoing projects would consume the entirety of this post,
yet I’m loathe to ignore any of them because they’re just so damn
good. From his work on the Emergency 2.0
Wiki, to his
work with PTSC-Online
(which I honestly want to steal as an idea), Patrice never stops. His
most underrated work, though, might just be his daily digest,
Patrice’s Picks. As Patrice
scours the web he saves everything that’s interesting or useful or a
best practice or a lesson learned. There is literally no reason to
read the newspaper after going through the daily picks. A devoted
father and husband, Patrice still finds time to take his kids to
football (soccer, dammit) and watch more hockey than I’m sure is good
for you. There are few people I would travel to another country just
to buy a drink. Patrice is one of them, and very well might be the
only one. He’s one of my best friends, digital or meatspace.

Thank you both for an amazing year, and for giving the rest of us
something to shoot for.

And the hits just keep on coming. Today we head all the way to the
West Coast, to beautiful, nothing-ever-happens-there, San Diego,
California.

But something did happen. Do you remember what you were doing on the
afternoon of September 8, 2011? If you were in parts of Arizona,
California or Mexico, you were walking around in the
dark wondering
what the heck was going on.

And if you were concerned about any type of public health aspect of
losing power (and really, there are only scores of reasons not to
lose power to avert public health problems), you had a friend in San
Diego County, California: Tom Christensen and the folks at the San
Diego County Health and Human Services Agency.

As PIO for SDCHHSA Tom coordinates messaging for the Agency, and on
that afternoon (and ultimately through the night), Tom got on Twitter
and blasted out as many updates as he could. I truly believe this is
one of the very best examples of how Twitter was used in a public
health emergency. And as such, Tom, and the rest of the San Diego
County Health and Human Services Agency folks, deserve a robust round
of applause, so without further ado:

The County of San Diego began its social media effort to highlight
County programs and services in March, 2009. The Health and Human
Services Agency (HHSA) followed and launched its social media efforts
in August, 2009. The County currently utilizes these accounts, as well
as a ReadySanDiego account
assigned to our Office of Emergency Services, during any emergency
situation.

We use all three accounts heavily in emergency situations. We will
often utilize features like Splitweet or HootSuite to send out the
same message on all three accounts.

We have fully embraced the use of social media, and our County of San
Diego Twitter is one of the top ten most followed local government
entity Twitter accounts in the nation with around 6,800 followers.

Twitter is becoming more of an immediate news source every day. It
seems the first place anyone hears of any major news event happening
is through Twitter. As a government entity, we use Twitter to reach
targeted audiences (in the case of HHSA, many of our followers are
local media members, other public health departments and health care
organizations); to reach the general public; and sometimes to by-pass
the traditional media with unfiltered messages.

We have had two emergency situations in the past two years with two
very different circumstances. The first was during the H1N1 pandemic
in 2009 and most recently, we had a power outage on Sept. 8, 2010,
that affected up to 7 million people in Southern California, western
Arizona and northern Mexico.

We did not begin using social media at HHSA until we were well into
the H1N1 crisis. We had been doing some messaging on the main County
account, but our first HHSA tweet reported three local deaths related
to H1N1 (these were the 14th-16th H1N1-related deaths in our County).
Since the pandemic was months old at that point, we mainly used social
media to remind people to get their H1N1 flu shot and to report
significant events such as deaths and mass vaccination clinics.

The power outage provides a better example of the power of social
media. This emergency unfolded quickly, and because it was a power
outage most of the mainstream media was unable to operate normally. TV
stations weren’t able to broadcast and the only radio station on the
air was the area’s designated emergency station that had a backup
generator.

Social media supplemented our public outreach of news conferences and
press releases during H1N1. During the power outage, traditional media
outreach wasn’t an option and people turned to Twitter in droves
seeking information and direction.

The three Twitter accounts
(SanDiegoCounty,
ReadySanDiego and
SDCountyHHSA) gained more than
2,400 followers during the power outage incident. The County Twitter
account sent out 123 messages during the nine hours most of the region
was without power and those tweets were retweeted dozens of times.
This provided solid evidence showcasing the power of social media and
how quickly you can spread your message.

It also allowed us to interact directly with the public. Without TV
coverage, Twitter became the main source of information and was more
immediate than Facebook or the County website. We received many tweets
from the public asking for specific information related to the power
outage and we were able to directly answer questions via Twitter.

One of the most practical uses of Twitter that evening was when we
announced we were going to have a press conference with County
officials and representatives from the power utility. People began
tweeting us back asking how they could get the information with no
television coverage. The answer? We “live tweeted” the press
conference. We sent out all the information from the press conference
in 140 character messages as it was happening.

Both during and after the power outage, we received dozens of tweets
from the public acknowledging us for providing them with constant
information. If anyone had doubts about the power of social media,
they were erased during the power outage.

Once you have established yourself as a reliable source of
information, people will continue to turn to you in a crisis. Social
media allows you to get your message out directly to the public and
allows them to help you spread that message even further. In an
emergency situation, it makes a great partner with traditional media
to get your message quickly to as many people as possible.