Public Health Affairs

Author: Jim

  • Are We Intentionally Ignoring 16% Of Our Population?

    I do love pop quizzes. Especially when I already know the answers.

    So, pop quiz!

    You’ve got a website, and a regularly updated blog, right? Of course
    you do. And every once in a while, it reads like this
    post    ,
    right? Right?

    Imagínense que acaba de perder la electricidad en su vivienda, ya sea por un temblor, un tornado,la explosión de una fábrica, o una bomba. ¿Ahora que va a hacer? ¿Va a salir de su vivienda o quedarse en ella? ¿Tiene una linterna? ¿Velas? ¿Fósforos? ¿Una radio que funcione con baterías? ¿Tiene baterías? ¿Ud. o alguien en su familia toma medicamentos que necesitan refrigeración? ¿Si usa lentes, los tiene a la mano? ¿Tiene mascotas?

    Let me guess your answer. No, right? And it’s isn’t a specific knock
    against you, because just about nobody does. But why? More than 16%
    of the US population is
    Hispanic    .
    I’ll bet there’s even some folks where you live that only speak
    Spanish. So, why aren’t you—I mean, we—engaging with what is a
    significant, and growing, portion of our population?

    I know, I know, it’s difficult and expensive to get stuff translated.
    But putting the preparedness message above aside for a minute and
    focusing on emergency communications for a second, you’ll find we have
    some leeway. If it’s an emergency, you can do things you wouldn’t
    normally do, like find alternate ways to translate something. In fact,
    I’ll even bet you probably have someone who speaks and writes and
    translates Spanish in your office. They don’t even have to write the
    copy, just translate it!

    Now, you guys know I don’t like to talk about the work we do in my
    office, but we did something very similar during H1N1. We developed
    public messages and passed them to folks in our office who could
    translate into Spanish and French. Within an hour, we could push
    messages out to a much larger, more diverse population than we could
    otherwise. That little trick is now a key component of our crisis
    communications plan.

    Need another reason to seriously plan and include? Beyond the obvious
    and previously stated goal of pushing our life-saving messages to the
    broadest possible audience, think of the positive PR you can get in
    those traditionally undeserved communities. We’ve complained about
    how nobody trusts government
    before    ,
    so wouldn’t the first step in gaining that trust be actually talking
    to people in their language? And once you get really good? Why not
    integrate other languages into your every day communications? (And I
    don’t mean having your Executive butcher another language on camera in
    an effort to appear inclusive.) Take, for example, the great work done
    by the Spanish language Twitter accounts for
    CDC,
    FoodSafety.gov, and the
    bilingual FEMA account.

    Take another look at your crisis communication plan, heck, your whole
    outreach plan, and see how much of it is focused on multilingual
    support and outreach. I’m willing to bet it’s not as much as it should
    be.

    Many, many thanks to Belen Moran
    for helping with this post.

  • Via Mashable: How the NFL Is Dominating Social Media

    The first is, focus and execution matter just as much as strategy. You have to be able to say “no” so you can focus on the right things, and you have to make sure that you execute relentlessly.

    Second, there’s a Patton quote: “The good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” The lesson there is that for most digital products, you’re better off getting it to 80% and launching it, knowing that the users will teach you more about where it should go than you’d be able to figure out on your own — and then it’s just iterate, iterate, iterate.

    Third, no one bats 1000. Google doesn’t. Facebook doesn’t. MySpace certainly didn’t. Even Reid Hoffman doesn’t. So you have to throw some bombs and know that not all will connect, and if you fail, fail fast and move on to the next thing.

    via mashable.com

    I’m a big fan of NFL football, so I read this whole article, but if you just read this quote on lessons learned from Jeff Berman, the General Manager of NFL Digital, you’ll see the basis for social media success.

    The Patton quote, to me, was the perfect distillation of why timid agencies fail to capture the zeitgeist. They are so worried about doing social media “right,” or ensuring that every possible bad outcome is planned for that they miss their opportunity and get caught lagging when their emergency hits.

  • Via Gerald Baron: DC tweeter loses Job, but union picks up the Twitter slack

    Union President Edward C. Smith acknowledged that the group, which in the recent past had mostly tweeted links to news articles, planned to step up its activity.

    “We are going to try to fill Pete’s shoes, though those are some shoes to fill,” he said. “Obviously, it’s a valuable service and we want to continue that.”

    So apparently if you want to know what DC Fire is up to, forget about @dcfireems, instead follow @IAFF36.

    via emergencymgmt.com

    Quick follow up on yesterday’s post about Pete Piringer and DC F&EMS from Gerald Baron, writing for Emergency Management Magazine.

    Apparently, IAFF Local 36 has decided to step up and fill the void in real-time information dissemination that the City has abdicated. In today’s world, where almost no one trusts government, do you really think this is the best course of action–if only from a PR perspective?

    Even if nominally, the DC F&EMS are providing information updates to the public and therefore not completely abdicating their responsibility, when compared with the presumed 100% transparency being provided by a private third-party, how do you think the populace must feel?

    My guess? Like the government doesn’t even care about them.