Category: Uncategorized

I’ll admit to being absolutely enthralled by whats been happening in Egypt this past week. If events follow what happened in Tunisia, we could see the face of the political world change wildly in the next couple of months. Take an admitted news junkie, add a dash of once-a-lifetime events, and place that person in the United States media market. The very definition of frustrating.

Good Morning America had twenty minutes or so on the (admittedly tragic) story of the Tampa Bay woman who killed her children, at the same moment that two million people are massing in Tahrir Square in Cairo and the Jordanian King has thrown out his government and appointed a new Prime Minister in order to stave off unrest. The Middle East is changing before our eyes! And Charlie Sheen’s drinking problem and how that affects the TV show Two and a Half Men is still making headlines.

The news service that is at the forefront of reporting on the situation is Al Jazeera. Even the local Philadelphia newspapers are reporting on this dearth of up to the minute news:

The best international TV coverage of the chaos in Egypt is coming from Al Jazeera, whose journalists fit right in with the throng. But, as the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim points out here, not a lot of Americans can watch it.

Because of previous governmental and corporate antipathy for the Arab news network, not to mention a general suspicion among millions of Americans, only a tiny handful of U.S. cable operators carry Al Jazeera English, although U.S. news outlets are using footage that the network is sharing.

For my part, I’ve been glued to a newly released iOS app published by Al Jazeera English. Live streaming video provided by livestream.com (and when that flunks out, it switches to audio only) of the events in Egypt, as they happen. It’s like CNN in the eighties and nineties.

All of those critics who scoff at the idea that the media we have is the best and reports only on the most newsworthy items have new ammunition to question the oligopoly.

The media bubble I’ve created to stay on top of events encompasses this Al Jazeera English app and Twitter generally. Specially, NPR’s Andy Carvin Twitter feed has been at the forefront of both Tunisian and Egyptian reporting.

Keep your ears to the ground folks, 2011 is already shaping up as a wild year.

Anyone who has ever given a preparedness presentation has had the question asked:

How are you going to inform the public (or us) when the power is out, or the Internet is out, or the cell phone signals are jammed?

The right answer is that we’re actively planning and working with all partners to ensure that we can reach you in an emergency, no matter the situation. It’s also good to note that we don’t depend solely on any one form of communication, so if one goes down we can use another.

This week’s events in Egypt have given us a real-life view into what might happen in just that situation. The Egyptian government has been shutting down Internet service providers throughout the weekend, and finally this afternoon (evening, Egyptian-time) succeeded in shutting down the last public link to the outside world.

But, like everything else in our world, it finds a way. According to Mashable (and nearly every other major tech blogger), Google has teamed up with engineers at the recently acquired SayNow company and Twitter to develop a “voice-to-tweet” tool:

The service, which is already live, enables users to send tweets using a voice connection. Anyone can tweet by leaving a voicemail on one of three international phone numbers: +16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855. Tweets sent using the service will automatically include the hashtag #egypt.

People can also listen to the messages by dialing the above numbers, and by clicking on the links posted to @speak2tweet.

The world is changing by the minute, and communications—especially social media tools and companies—are creating the bleeding edge. And now we know what we might do when the Internet goes out.

So, to be completely honest, I’m a bit disappointed in you all. There were some major holes in last week’s post, and no one called me put on them. For shame!

Assuming outgoing messages will be disseminated solely by the PIO or JIC is naive at best and ostrich-like (H/T Jonathan Bernstein) at worst. Large responses can be peopled by dozens, hundreds, or thousands of responders. Do you really think that none of them has a smartphone with Facebook loaded on it?

So, let’s start there. Obviously some social media posts should be verboten. Images of survivors (or worse, victims), posts questioning the response operations, and information leaks (read: disclosing confidential information about the situation or response) are, in my mind, cause for release from the scene. Beyond that is the gray area.

What should be done about responders who are not within the JIC but are still posting messages that either echo or support the JICs message, or more fuzzily, that support the operation, but aren’t part of the JIC messaging. Consider operational staff who tweet about 9th Street being closed because it’s the primary route from the staging area to the scene, or remind their Facebook friends that the water isn’t safe to drink and should be boiled, or retweeting your official messages. Would you dismiss those folks? I’m not sure.

And what about all of those social media policies that the experts are telling us to develop? How do these figure into things? Consider a multi-agency response with partners as varied as the Red Cross, which has a great and liberal social media policy, and your typical municipal government, which has either no social media policy or a very restrictive policy. Does whoever get placed into the Incident Commander position get to trump established practices within those other agencies that are contributing to the response? I’m guessing yes, but shouldn’t that be worked out beforehand? Before some poor Red Crosser starts posting away and gets smacked down by the IC?

For some of our private sector readers, think about a situation where your company sub-contracts out parts of the crisis response. The stakes are just as high, and certain bells can’t be unrung. If your sub-contractor hasn’t developed their social media policies yet, and their employees feel free to tweet away, and then one of them posts something like, “OMG, you wouldn’t believe how disgusting this plant is, rat [feces] EVERYWHERE! I’m never eating at [your company’s name] again!!!” It’s easy to take that person off the job, and maybe you can terminate the contract, but with one tweet, your whole crisis communication plans are down the tube.

The final piece of the puzzle is what to do in some of the above situations. I mentioned removing someone from a response, but (and I’m asking some of our seasoned responders here) how easy is that? Barring that, could you forbid someone from using their smartphone (assuming they’re critical to the response)?

Furthermore, now that you’ve got to clean up the mess, does your PIO actively address the situation by mentioning that a responder was involved? I know your first thought is that they shouldn’t, but given that your rogue tweeter has probably identified that they are on-scene, it might be impossible not to say they’re attached to the response.

Now it’s your turn. What did I miss? What else can go mind-boggling wrong with social media during a response effort?