Category: Uncategorized

Thanks to the fine folks at NPHIC, I had the
rare pleasure of participating in the 2011 National Conference on
Health Communication, Marketing and Media,
sponsored by SAMHSA, the
NCI and NPHIC. What
an amazing conference!

My first reaction to attending this conference was, “Wow, look at all
of the women!” I’m used to attending emergency management conferences
full of men and this was quite a change, to say the least. While there
certainly were men there, and there certainly are women at my EM
conferences, I wonder why the gender balance is so severe. Especially
when there is so much GREAT information that we can learn from
different conferences. I learned so much from all of these amazing
communicators that was completely relevant to my everyday work that,
frankly, it reinvigorated me. I can’t WAIT to try some of this stuff.

The theme of the conference was “Listening for Change,” and that
simple idea, listening, was a common thread throughout the week.
Listening to one’s audience is important to ensure that our messages
are getting through, that we can tweak our messaging to make sure that
it addresses the needs we are looking to work on and to preemptively
develop messages and campaigns that actually work! Too often, I think,
our messages (both in public health AND public information) are
developed in a vacuum and released into the ether. Listening rarely
occurs.

The sessions I attended touch on a wide variety of subjects, but I
think I can distill them down to two: full-throated use of social
media networks and identifying and relating to the many audiences you
strive to meet, which is fun, because I tend to talk about those two
subjects lots here.

I can succintly put three ideas out there that I really consider takeaways.

1. Your audience is varied. Every time you push a message out, it will
   reach different ears and eyes. Is a message pushed to the media
   appropriate for the public? Is a message pushed to the media
   structured in such a way for them to pick it up? Is a message
   appropriate to mothers or fathers and why? Does that “why” influence
   whether or not they will successfully receive your message? There was
   an amazing session called, “Not All Parents Are The Same,” that talked
   about just that.

2. Consider unusual uses of social media. These ideas came from a
   session called, “Using Twitter as a Tool for Community Engagement and
   Collaboration,” and focused on the hows and whys of Twitter chats,
   townhalls and “Twitter-views.” Twitter is not just a push tool, but an
   opportunity to interact very, very closely with a potentially WIDE
   range of people. The White House, HHS Office of Disease Prevention and
   Health Promotion, Health Literacy Missouri and CDC National Prevention
   Information Network have used these types of tools to make Twitter
   MORE useful, both to themselves and their publics.

3. Fail fast. Kevin Dame and Chris Waugh of
   IDEO took part in an extremely well put
   together session using the common issue of childhood obesity and how
   to reduce or prevent it as each presenter’s point of departure. Their
   presentation took the stand that we’re too invested in what we do.
   Consider your latest big project. How many years should it take to
   implement? How many tens of thousands of dollars? By the time that
   project is ready to go, you’re most likely wed to it and it’s success.
   You will do backflips to ensure that the last three years of your life
   (or so) haven’t been wasted. Even if they may have been. The IDEO
   folks advocated that we should instead be looking to design
   “sacrificial projects.” These are projects that are put together in
   hours and with minimal budgets. That way, if they fail, who cares,
   because it’s only been two days worth of time. And undoubtedly the
   project designers learned something from the exercise, so it’s not a
   complete waste. Try. Fail. Try again, but in a slightly (or vastly)
   different way. Eventually you’ll succeed, or learn enough to advance
   the science of what you’re doing. (And frankly, think how interesting
   your job would be if you had new projects every couple of weeks.)

Thank you to every amazing person I met in Atlanta at the conference.
Thank you to all of the great Tweeters that live-tweeted every session
well enough that I always regreted that I chose a particular session
and wished that I was in the other one (and likely they felt the
same about the session I was in). And once again, thank you NPHIC for
the wonderful opportunity.

There are only a few key points that I strongly recommend on this
blog. In fact, most folks at work know that I regularly use the maxim,
“It depends.” But I do believe there are some absolutes, some
recommendations that everyone should seriously consider. One of those
recommendations is to establish a presence on various social media
networks. Today.

The thing is, I know it’s not that easy. There are executives to
remind, legal wants to review, IT to fight, content to create and, oh
yeah, your job to do, too.

One of my other favorite sayings is, “Don’t be a dontbe, be a doobie!”
(Illicit reference completely unintentional, and funny every time.) So
how can we be doobies when faced with a blazing need to push
information on social networks that we have no presence on? Like, say,
a crisis, or emergency, or disaster. First, we need to realize that
social media is going to collect and forward and be a source of
voluminous amounts of information. And we have a desperate need to
participate in that discussion. Where others see a potential problem
(Dontbe’s), I see a solution (I’m a doobie! See? Funny every time.).

Am I not being clear enough? How about we let Joe Tripodi of
Coca-Cola, writing in the Harvard Business
Review,
put it more bluntly in this great article I’ve already linked to once:

Accept that you don’t own your brands; your consumers do. Coca-Cola first learned this lesson in 1985 with the introduction of New Coke, but it’s become even more important with the growth of social media. As I write this, Coca-Cola’s Facebook page has more than 25 million likes (fans). Our fanpage wasn’t started by an employee at our headquarters in Atlanta. Instead, it was launched by two consumers in Los Angeles as an authentic expression of how they felt about Coca-Cola. A decade ago, a company like ours would have sent a “cease and desist” letter from our lawyer. Instead, we’ve partnered with them to create new content, and our Facebook page is growing by about 100,000 fans every week.

Yeah, sure, but they’re not the government, it’s just Coke! Right?

But what if a government did farm out their Facebook presence in an
emergency? Like, say ChristChurch, New Zealand after an earthquake?
The Southold Voice points us in that direction
here:

Concerned citizens are currently joining one particular Facebook page at the rate of 400+ per hour, with numbers increasing exponentially as I write. Although there are at least two other community or business organized, credible Facebook pages for the Christchurch disaster, offering news, updates and related support services, there’s nothing to compete with this one particular page.

Too far afield? How about Joplin, Missouri? Fortunately, the City of
Joplin had a Facebook page already. But in the aftermath of the EF-5
tornado that devastated the town, one man set up a Facebook page that
just took off. More than 100,000 Likes in four days took off. The
official page today, months
later, still has less than 13,000. The Columbia Business Times has
the story here.
The City of Joplin, to their credit, weren’t too proud, they didn’t
try to push people to the official page. They accepted that the
audience, for whatever reason, was somewhere else and took their
message there.

Today’s lesson? Set up accounts and be active on social media
networks. Barring that, be ready (and willing) to utilize
community-developed social media accounts. If your public is getting
their information from somewhere unofficial, consider working with the
account-holder to disseminate official information.

Remember, the MOST IMPORTANT thing is to get good information to
your publics in an emergency. Do it however you can, even if it means
going around official channels.

Okay, I love this recent article in the
Economist.

Love.

I have yet to read anything that so succinctly describes the state of
the media on the long arc. It describes an idea that I’d been tossing
around for a while—bloggers as modern-day pamphleteers—but never
developed as perfectly as this, with a nod to the history of media.

I love this article because we can learn so much from it (and because
it validates what I’ve been thinking). How many of us, PIOs, media
companies, communications specialists, content developers, reporters,
are terrified about what’s been going on in the media these days? Here
in Philly, our newspapers are casting about for any way to stay afloat
in these new digital times. Many, many people are terrified that the
world they’ve worked in, toiled in, gave their lives for, is
disappearing. They reject it. They rail against it. Pointless. Fad.
Waste of time.

And yet? This is just a return to how media was always conducted, as
we see in the article. The deviation is correcting.

So what can we learn? Look to the history books for lessons. Without
vertical mass media to steer things, opinions are developed, fanned
and set ablaze by the most vociferous amongst us, the most committed,
the most dedicated. Think Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, Al Qaeda,
Michele Bachmann, Gary Vaynerchuk, Al Gore. I won’t dare to compare
the content of these thinkers, but the absolute dedication to
advancing their ideals is what allows them to shape popular thought
and discourse. They are changing the world today (or back then, as
the case may be), and are doing it while completely avoiding the mass
media as a dissemination tool.

So, how does this affect us as professional communicators? First, and
most importantly, they’re going to do what they do whether you think
social media is a fad or not. This is one area where the maxim, “Lead,
follow, or get run the hell over,” applies perfectly. If you ignore
it, you will get burned. Simple as that.

Second lesson? Understand that this process is not like a runaway
train. It can be acted upon. It can be massaged. It can be harnessed
and redirected as necessary. Or, it can be monitored. So you can get
ahead of it.

This second step is probably the most difficult thing to learn. All of
the rules of how we interact with the media are becoming less and less
useful. Do we treat bloggers and tweeters the same as reporters?
Should we? Or are they simply pamphleteers writing for local, slanted
rags like they did two hundred years ago?

For an example, I was totally impressed by how Philly’s Press
Secretary, Mark McDonald, recently handled a false story that was
gained national traction due to a Gawker
post:

The Max Read story you have today is utterly false. There is no policy, plan or activity in Philadelphia where pedestrians are being ticketed for texting.

Your whack job reporter can spin his puerile fantasies about doing violence to people he does not like, but he first needs to get his facts straight. Indeed, Max might want to do a little READING before he writes.

Five years ago, he would have lost his job post haste. Today, with the
new rules? Well, he’s still here. Just like he would’ve been two
hundred years ago.

It truly is a brave new world.