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I loved this post. I loved the disconnect between government speak and real person speak. Great lesson learned and a truly tremendous resource in Ms. Mitchell’s dissertion. Definitely worth a reread.

Courtesy of Carolyne Mitchell, who is a fantabulous Information Officer with the South Lanarkshire Council, we’ve been treated to a great story about the naming of winter storms. It also gives us the opportunity to see what happens in real life when government isn’t paying attention to the terms the public uses. With that, I cede the floor.

Jim’s Winter is Coming post about the naming of winter storms resonated strongly with us Scots.

Back in December 2011, Scotland braced itself for one of its worst storms in living history. The Met Office had forecast the storm and issued alerts. In Strathclyde, local emergency groups had been set up in most councils to discuss school closures, social care provision, flood alerts, road closures, tree removal and general contingency planning. On December 7, the day before the storm, the Scottish Government recommended that councils should close all schools. The Met Office not only prepared the public for the weather, the media was also prepared for a busy news day.

In the end the storm resulted in widespread disruption including 60,000 houses left with no power, travel disruption, storm damage to homes and cars due to fallen trees and airborne debris and police forces around the country had advised against travelling.

But the storm provided a challenge for emergency responders and many other organisations. As the social media lead for my council, I watched the day unfold and managed the council Twitter account from home as my daughter’s school was closed. By mid-morning the public had nicknamed the storm Hurricane Bawbag and it was this hashtag that was adopted by the majority on Twitter causing #hurricanebawbag to trend, not only in Scotland but around the world.

For those not sure about the Scottish vernacular, bawbag is slang for scrotum and is usually used as a derogatory term. It’s a mild swear word that children would be told off for using. Basically us Scots were throwing down a challenge to Mother Nature – bring it on wind, if you think you’re hard enough!

However, the police and most local authorities decided that bawbag was a wholly inappropriate for them to use on their Twitter streams and they, and the Scottish Government, went for the straight #scotstorm.

What did this mean? Well, most people were reveling over in the #bawbag camp with photos of the River Clyde bursting its bank in several places, film clips of journalists on sea walls just about getting swept away, a now infamous film of an escaped trampoline rolling down a street, an enterprising Glasgow T-shirt company printing #bawbag T-shirts before the day was over and American TV news stations reporting about Hurricane Bawbag without knowing what the word meant.

Meanwhile over in the #scotstorm camp, the authorities were publishing news of closed roads, closed bridges, how to report fallen trees and other important messages, mostly to an empty room.

And the moral of the story? Go where the people are – don’t try to shoehorn yourself into a hashtag of your own making because you don’t like the one that grew organically in the heat of the moment.

I recently spent a year researching the growth of the use of Twitter during emergencies by both the emergency responders and journalists in Strathclyde for my Masters dissertation. Although things have moved on a pace since I wrote it, it still makes for interesting reading. Lovingly entitled, From John Smeaton to #hurricanebawbag: The development of social media use during emergencies by Strathclyde’s media and emergency responders, it sits on my blog which sadly I haven’t updated since August, something I promise sort out asap.

You’ll also find me on Twitter and LinkedIn – let’s connect :-)

Things are changing around here, and I wanted to highlight the best of the blog during December, 2013. The first week is devoted to my favorite guest posts and posters. The second week is devoted to my three most engaging posts. The third and fourth weeks count down my top six most trafficked posts, truly, the best of the best. These overview posts will have links to each of the posts for the week.

Stay tuned to all of my posts for the rest of the week as I highlight three of my absolute favorite guest posts. It’s really tough to hand over the reins of something you’ve poured your life into for the last three plus years and kinda hope for the best. And my guest posters have never disappointed me. Offering truly innovative posts and best-in-the-business writers talking about topics that changed the world, or changed the face of how emergencies are responded to, the three posts I’m highlighting this week are truly excellent. Interestingly, two of the guest posts are part of their own series; the story was too big to tell all at once. Be sure to click through and see the whole story.

First up, we’re talking about a massive storm that engulfed Scotland, and how the Scotch public collectively fought back.
Secondly, PIO Marcus Deyerin gives us a riveting, first-hand account of being the primary information responder at the I-5 Skagit Bridge Collapse.
Finally, we turn to APHL’s Executive Director, Scott Becker, as he looks back to September 11th and that horrible Fall.

TL;DR: tradition you don’t know about, y’all rock, mic drop.

Happy Thanksgiving American friends! Happy Unbirthday non-American friends!

So, I’ve got this little tradition of giving you a quick behind the scenes peek at life behind the Face of the Matter, and what a better time to do it than on Thanksgiving. Here’s the story from last year:

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.

And here we are, nearly SEVEN years later. Am I officially Internet-old now? I keep looking for my Logan’s Run jewel, but nothing yet. I thought last year was great, but this year has been a humdinger. And isn’t that how things are supposed to go?

I got the opportunity to travel and present to amazing audiences all over the country. Meet dozens of amazing people and see friends from too long ago. No pandemic still (yay!), and my Program has great plans for the future. The blog is wildly successful, better than I ever thought it would be. And probably the biggest news is that kid #3 is rapidly winging her way into my burgeoning family’s arms (February 2nd!).

But the news that’s probably most relevant to you, dear reader, is my new job. I’ve been given the okay to let the world know that, as of January 1, I will be moving out of the public health preparedness world and into a brand new position, Director of Digital Public Health, here at my health department.

My job will be to oversee the identification, feasibility, implementation and integration of digital goodness (everything from social media to apps, to APIs to crowdsourcing to mobile and beyond) into our department. I! Am! So! Excited!

With every grand, new endeavor comes change, unfortunately, and the blog is one of those things that will change. (Seriously, new kid AND a new job? I’ll probably sell my soul for a few hours of sleep.) I’m not abandoning it. I love you guys too, too much. But I’m going to be dialing things back a bit. No more three posts a week, at least not for a while. Instead, if I can do a post a week, I’ll be over the moon. Because social media and public information and risk communication is still within my professional purview, we’ll keep talking about them, but we might sprinkle in some of that digital goodness I talked about earlier, too.

Until the new year, though, I wanted to give you a present, something to remember me by. For the next four weeks, I’m going into the stacks of the blog and will be reposting the best posts, the most popular, the ones that–oops–I got wrong, my personal favorites. Three of the best of Jim Garrow, for four weeks. Almost like a countdown.

Which, not exactly coincidentally, is the other tradition we have around these parts. For the last couple of years, Patrice Cloutier, Kim Stephens and I have done a sort of end-of-year holiday countdown. This will be my contribution, and will hopefully serve to demonstrate how far our field of emergency communications and response have come. I’ll definitely be highlighting their work constantly on Twitter, so keep an eye out for that.

And now for the behind the scenes. My traffic this year has been out of this world. I set a new personal daily record, and broke it (302 views). I set new records in weekly and monthly views (3,013 views). I’ve got the most subscribers I’ve ever had (110). Last year, I reported that I’d seen 16,000 views all time, and in just this calendar year, I’ve seen more than 20,600, more than doubling my previous three years of views.

Other than longevity, only two things changed this year. First, I’ve presented more, and I direct folks to my about.me page in most of my presentations. But unless I’m the best, most persuasive presenter in the world (hey, it’s possible), that’s doesn’t nearly account for the huge surge in viewership starting in April. What did happen in April was the other thing that changed: I started posting more often. Usually three times a week, sometimes four. Consistently, for weeks on end. And my traffic skyrocketed. For the non-astute among you, there’s a lesson there, I think.

And just to close, I want to thank you all. For everything. You make my work enjoyable, you make me happy. I’m so excited to start on this new adventure with you and hope that you’ll stick around while I get my feet under me. (And wish me luck!)