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In the past, I’ve written about how being on social media is a key way to humanize your agency, to tell the story of your agency and all of the amazing things you do. Well, according to a blog post I recently saw, that might not be the best way to tell your story anymore. This article is talking about the future of About Us webpages. Now think about your agency’s About Us page, and how great that page is. Laughing at me yet?

The thing is, I actually think the article makes a good point. Well not how About Us webpages are currently constructed, but with a bit of love, who knows:

The reality is that we want to know as much of the product we are going to buy, as we want to know about the company that is selling them to us. Marketing is not just about selling a product anymore, it’s about promoting a company as well. We love Apple, as well as the iPhone. We love Nike as well as the Fuel Band. We love Hard Graft (if you don’t, you should) as well as their iPhone cover. The first two spent millions on building their brand story through advertisement and activation stunts, the last one is doing it through their website’s About Page.

Now think about how your agency could do something similar. Think about telling the story of your Commissioner, the work she’s done in order to get to her position, how dedicated or groundbreaking her work say. Not government bio speak, but a real story. With links to relevant sites and documents, maybe a video interview.

Sure when I say it like that, you can make the argument that this is self-aggrandizing, but when you consider that your communicators are fighting tooth and nail to get people to listen to them; fighting against the perception that your agency is a faceless bureaucracy hell-bent on taxing every dollar away from them. Don’t you think that maybe a little bit of humanity might help?

Remember, you’re not just selling your Commissioner or your agency’s programs. You’re selling public health, or public safety, or preparedness, or fire safety. And people today want to know who’s selling those things. We know where our shirts are made, we know what country made our cars, we know what food went into the cows that gave us milk and steaks. But we ask the public to accept our recommendations based upon what? The fact that we’re the government? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the government isn’t the most trusted source of information these days.

But if we weren’t the government, if we were instead real people who’ve spent the last thirty years dedicating ourselves to public service? And we’ve got families and streams in the community? Because all of that is true, and can help us sell our messages. And all it takes is one updated About Us webpage.

Time for another video post! This week the subject isn’t very happy, but you do get to hear me say, “Howdy.”

In the video, I reference this post. As always, I’d love your feedback on this video.

I had the amazing opportunity to hear Lt. Gen. Russel Honore speak yesterday at the Northeast Texas Public Health Preparedness Conference. General Honore, you may remember, is well known for his role leading the evacuation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. General Honore spoke a lot about preparedness and about leadership, but one of his key messages was about doing; about how sometimes it was actually harmful to wait for approval to act.

He gave two examples of when this applied. The first was from the Revolutionary War, and described General Washington’s famous Christmas boat ride across the Delaware River. In today’s media climate the mission would’ve been picked apart and lambasted by the media and armchair pundits as ripe for failure; I mean, his men had no boots, no food, no boats! But they believed, and the General knew it was right, so they “borrowed” boats from up and down the riverbank, sailed over and saved the day. The second was during the response to the Shuttle Columbia disaster when National Guard troops began to secure the scenes and identify wreckage without being deployed. It had to get done, and they were qualified, they might as well do it before anyone got hurt.

These stories reminded me of when I got my Department on social media. It was the summer before we started giving out H1N1 vaccine. We were in a planning meeting, going around to each of our Division’s Programs, making sure everyone knew their role in the upcoming vaccine distribution effort. As the meeting was just about to wrap up, I meekly piped up from the back of the room that I wanted to maybe consider using social media, too. My Division Director looked at me, asked if I was having going to break anything, and after I said no, gave her blessing. We started tweeting and Facebooking that week. It was all elementary, though, as well I already had the accounts made, because I knew that if this got as bad as we feared, I was going to do it anyways. It was the right thing to do, and I was prepared to accept the consequences if it failed. It didn’t come to that, thankfully, and the rest is history, and now our Department is one of the leaders of using social media in public health.

I like to think that success stems from my being really good at social media, but the truth is much simpler than that. Because it ended up being the right thing, I think anyone would have succeeded. What I contributed was little more than a (meek) suggestion. The guts to speak up and be willing to live with what I wrought.

And therein lies today’s lesson. Sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. When delay is critical and approvals are onerous for onerous sake, sometimes… That, of course, shouldn’t absolve you of responsibility: if things blow up, it’s still your fault, but doing should always be an option.

Now I know this might be an unpopular point of view, but here’s my rationale. It’s not running off the rails, it’s not ignoring protocol, it’s risk taking, and that’s something I think much of government could do a little more of. I found an article on LinkedIn today that describes what I mean, admonishing folks to try to get fired:

Large corporations [ed. note: read: governments] focus on managing risk and minimizing downside… [M]any CEOs define his or her mission as not losing what has already been gained. Taking big swings for the fence is often not worth the risk.

Which is why as an employee, your willingness to get fired is what will set you apart — and if you are truly skilled — elevate your career and your company to the next level.

Every once in a while we, as communicators, find ourselves in extraordinary circumstances. When we’re faced with that situation, should we be protocol-driven and wholly dependant on approvals, or should we have the option to do what’s right and ask for forgiveness afterwards?