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It seems my good friend Patrice has already gotten a start on our little end-of-year project. The first few posts have been, as is to be expected, excellent. So I should probably get going.

Instead of doing what I did last year, highlighting events that demonstrated how social media was useful in emergencies (because I think we’re beyond the point where we need to demonstrate that anymore), this year I’d like to focus on lessons learned. Because boy, there were a lot of them.

Through the end of the year, I’ll be posting the five biggest lessons I learned this year about how social media is used in emergencies. I think these five things will greatly influence how social media will be used in next year’s emergencies, both by the public and by emergency responders. Much like all of our exercises and real life responses, we won’t learn anything for the next response if we don’t catalog lessons learned (and actually learn from them). This is my attempt to do just that. As always, please let me know your thoughts and if I’ve missed anything. (I’ll update these links as the posts are published, so feel free to link to this page for the full series.)

#1: The public uses social media in emergencies, and they expect us to as well.
#2: A picture is worth a thousand words.
#3: Facebook is not a silver bullet, and may actually be a lot less.
#4: Social media gaffes are survivable.
#5: The media uses social media, and will come to rely on it.

This year has been truly amazing. My family is happy, healthy and safe. Work has been interesting and fun. I’ve been given several opportunities to present on the topic that most interests me across the country to great and growing audiences. I’ve made new friends, while at the same time maintained, grew and reestablished existing friendships. I’ve learned more this year than I think I did during any school year.

I. Am. Thankful.

Years ago, there was a public health blog, Effect Measure, that had a nice little Thanksgiving tradition. On Thanksgiving, the author would give an update on the blog and thank the many people who he interacted with over the previous year. The story was that the (pseudononymous) author, while waiting for his wife to finish Thanksgiving dinner, started a blog on a whim. The result was wildly successful. I consider that the very first public health blog (without minimizing the amazing contributions of Jordan Barab’s Confined Space blog, which technically started first). The author’s gusto and pseudonymity gave me the courage to blog.

Nearly six years later, I still am, and I haven’t regretted one second of it. While I’ve never attained the success that many of my blogging heroes have enjoyed, I have no complaints. This is because I’m not writing for everyone. I’m writing for you. And me. And as long you enjoy what I write, and what I write is true to what I believe, this is a wildly successful endeavor.

So, without further ado, what’s happening behind the curtains: more than 16,000 views all time. While the most visited post is an old post on my attending the FEMA G-290 course, the post with the craziest trajectory is the one where I called for an end to the discussion about whether social media had a role in emergency response, The Inflection Point. The craziest part is that I’ve had visitors from more than 100 countries. I believe it, too, considering the amazing friends I’ve made overseas based off this blog and my Twitter. (I’ve even been given the reins to a phenomenal local government comms blog in England for the day!)

For those of you who like their TL;DR: thank you, for being you, for stopping by to see me.

I saw this video last week, and instantly fell in love with it. It really made the rounds on the Internet this past weekend, so apologies if you’ve already seen it.

If you haven’t seen it, this is an amazing video by Off Book, a web series from PBS that explores cutting edge art, internet culture, and the people that create it. It’s a collection of short interviews with Web journalists who have found Twitter to be a useful tool in the job. The b-roll is a ton of journalistically-important tweets intended to demonstrate just how critical monitoring Twitter is to journalists.

Besides it being a really well put together video, it demonstrates a few things that I’ve felt were important for a while. First, we, as communicators, need to be aware of the tools that the press and the public are using.

Second, and more importantly I think, is the role that the press are starting to assume in this world. When information was at a premium and difficult to find, reporters held the role of information conduits. The public got information about the world and breaking news from the press. The press, thankfully, thought it important to ensure that they told the truth and told it objectively.

Today though, there is a glut of information out there, the public breaks news before the press even gets it’s pants on, and some news outlets have begun to act as balance points against other outlets (see MSNBC and Fox News). In that world, reporters have struggled to find their role. Should they strive to break news? Struggle to act as the sole distributor of news?

I think, because of their professionalism and specialized training, reporters should strive to be right. To be the distributors of confirmed information. To be the ones that separate the wheat from the chaff, investigate through the lies and misdirection, be the final word on situations. To cull through the firehose of Twitter, identify sources and confirm the story. That’s the impact of Twitter on journalism.