communication. community. cognition.
This is a very short retrospective article over at Accuweather.com, looking back at the lessons learned during the tornado outbreak of April 27, 2011.
It’s worth a read on its own merits, but I’m sharing because of the personal connection I have to both of the key players.
[Read more...]
I’ve known the people at CustomScoop for a few years now. Jen and Chip (and the others who have been part of the Media Bullseye Roundtable, like Doug and Sarah…) They do good work, and have been among the few who have provided real thought leadership in emerging communications, without succumbing to hype.
It’s fair to say I would never have been on their radar if it hadn’t been for my work with the American Red Cross, and the integration of social media with disaster-related communications. That’s why I got a message from them about a week ago. After waves of killer tornadoes in Alabama in April and Missouri in May, Jen reached out to ask me about the logistics of helping out, in the way they best knew how.
CustomScoop is giving away 100 media monitoring packages for disaster-related non-profits.
Having been on disaster assignments, I can’t begin to tell you how helpful that can be.
In the heat of disaster, gathering up clips and analyzing them for reputation management issues can be pretty low on the priority list. And trying to go back and compile them in the waning days of an operation can be spotty at best, and impossible at worst.
The offer from CustomScoop is for disaster relief organizations, and comes with no strings. Additionally, it’s not tied to any particular geographic area. (Jen and I talked about this days before the tornado hit Massachusetts, very close to home for the CustomScoop crew.)
It just goes to show that no matter what you do, or what your skills, there are ways to support those who suddenly find themselves with every need imaginable.
I had a lovely vacation, and returned with a couple of lovely thoughts about communicating from solid ground.
You know, the wise man built his house on the rock, the foolish man built his on sand (or wrote in the sky.)
While there are many facets and layers to this, they all boil down to one thing: do you own it?
Those of you on wordpress.com or blogspot.com domains, are building on someone else’s sand.
Those of you on Twitter and Facebook are building your reputation on someone elses’s sand.
And sand shifts.
Image by pedrosz on Flickr
When the dunes move, they can tear down things you’ve built.
I made a decision a few months ago to build my own link shortener, using an open-source script that I housed on my own server space. (It’s not my physical server box in my house, but if I rent it and own the data, then I can export it. Not quite sand…)
At the time, there was much discussion about how link shorteners can be used to hide malware, and the issue of trust remains a big one with me. If you ever see an http://ike4.me link out in the wild, you can rest assured that only two people might have created it. It was either me, or my friend Adam Daniel Mezei. You don’t have to worry about whether it was a malware link that someone foisted on me, that is automatically coming to infect you.
There is a larger trust factor involved too. I hesitated writing about this, but I had been consulting with my friends at the American Red Cross and the Centers for Disease Control for a while, discussing the benefits of having custom URL shorteners. In a major disaster or pandemic, there is a great benefit in knowing that the public health advice being offered is truly from a trusted source. (I didn’t write about this in the open, for fear that idiot speculators would jump out and grab all of the good obvious short URLs and hold the organizations hostage for a sale.) But seeing a shortened link with rc4.us (or some variation) would carry a lot more merit, and people would be more inclined to act on it and share it.
Before you dismiss this, you need to understand how crucial the elements of trust and consistency are in a time of public confusion. When you see conflicting statements from organizations, it rapidly promotes inaction for the very people you are trying to help.
After a while, it is too confusing to sort out, and paralysis ensues.
Imagine what the next big public health issue will look like. The Red Cross and the CDC — who have been very diligent about making their messages uniform. During disasters, the Red Cross works with FEMA for the same reasons.
But you know as well as I do that those messages will get drowned out by all of the well-meaning bloggers and contributors who dig up their old versions of documents, some of which were never right to begin with, and sharing them across the internet. In a major disaster, a large segment of the population will turn to Huffington Post and other high-traffic sites, and consider what they see there.
Which is why the branded link shortener can be so very important.
Yesterday, Twitter unveiled an upcoming feature, whereby all links in Tweets will be “wrapped” by a link with the t.co domain.
When Twitter began, the default shortener was (the now gargantuan) tinyurl.com, then it switched to bit.ly. The difference now is that every link will apparently be washed through Twitter’s shortener service, and will appear as a t.co.
Twitter is offering a benefit, namely it will screen out the malware links which made trust an issue in the beginning. But I submit that it doesn’t solve the other trust issues remaining, and it leaves Twitter vulnerable. Now if a piece of malware does squeeze through, Twitter is indeed culpable because it has made the pledge to stop that. Also, there will be issues with false positives, and the possibility that really scummy Black Hat SEO types will figure out how to temporarily get their competitors on the Twitter black-list.
http://ike4.me will still work for me, but it now gives me no real advantage. And I would have to think that the bit.ly and awe.sm services that have been offering premium-level service to nyti.ms and huff.to and others will feel the pain. After all, why should the New York Times bother promoting a service that brands its links, if no one sees the branding.
Yes, it’s only Twitter for now. But consider:
That’s what you get when you build on sand. And that’s why I want to own as much of my data as I can, and you ought to as well.
Thanks to the internet, any crank with access can write something that spreads. If you’re managing the reputation of a brand, the factor working in your favor is there is so much material being published that it is the rare message that cuts through the clutter.
But how do you recognize it before it starts doing its damage?
The following is a piece I wrote for the Now Is Gone blog, but now there is some added backstory. (Most of what I write has a backstory. It makes it easier to draw distinct conclusions; the trick is in generalizing them enough that you can communicate it without tipping the backstory.) [Read more...]
One of the great things about connecting with others online is the chance to be part of some interesting discussions. Such was the case of a conversation I recently had with Andrew Fowler, one of the principles at Newsvetter in Portland.
He was concerned about the lack of truly relevant information parents were getting about the spread of the H1N1 virus (swine flu) as the school year was to begin. Sure, outlets like the CDC have done an incredible job pumping out information, but as good as it is, it lacks local context. If the CDC tweets information about several regions and cities having an outbreak, what does that do to the psyche of those living elsewhere?
The fact is that in social networks, relevance is the multiplier that matters the most. I’ll read many things of general interest, but show me something in my back yard and you’ll get my attention.
With that in mind, Andrew and I hatched a framework for connecting health information resources at a local level – one that can be replicated in as many communities as are interested. It involves using Posterous.com as a central input hub for a number of agencies, then using the inherent routing of Posterous to spin that information into other social networks.
Andrew set up the backend of the Northwest Oregon Swine Flu Newsroom as a plain-vanilla Posterous blog. He then connected it to automatically spool feeds through a Twitter account and a Facebook page just for that purpose. Currently, the information is being provided by the Multnomah County Health Department and the Oregon Trail Chapter of the American Red Cross. As a result, residents in and around greater Portland can now quickly access a stream of information meant specifically for them.
I have long advocated for the use of WordPress blogs as online newsrooms, going back to the very first ones we set up at Red Cross for specific disaster operations. WordPress is fantastic in this regard, because of the use of static pages and especially category and tag-specific RSS feeds. If you check the Red Cross Online Disaster Newsroom, you’ll see how flexible that platform can be.
However, that also requires training many individuals on how to upload and produce in WordPress. Not that daunting a task, really – but when you will have subject matter coming from a consortium, you may not have the luxury of that mandated training.
The great advantage of using Posterous for projects like this one is the only interface is email. You can add several email addresses as authorized contributors, and everything they send in as attachments gets converted and prepared for consumption. Also, you can use the system as a router by specifying exactly where Posterous is to publish.
Additionally, the media is mixed in a fashion that plays well with other networks, too. If you take a video from your cell phone and email it to Posterous, when that video gets posted to your Facebook as a clickable embedded stream – not just a link.
The notion here is creating an easy machine where multiple agencies can add to an aggregate feed – and then make the output available in multiple formats for easy adoption and consumption. As a multi-input multi-output publishing engine – with a low-hurdle interface of email – the Posterous model deserves serious consideration for a variety of uses.
Add in the fact that as of this week you can skin and customize the look of a Posterous blog (like I have with mine) makes it even more attractive.
The following is a piece I wrote for Ragan.com and reposted here:
How to save your employees’ butts without scaring off their pants
Panic is a part of human nature. It’s also inconvenient, as panic influences individual decisions and can derail your most well-intentioned advice. How you deal with it reflects on your skills as a communicator.
For example, somewhere there exists a perfect formula for chest compressions and rescue breaths that will give a dying patient the greatest chance for survival during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). You’ll never hear about that perfect ratio in a First Aid class because it’s not a round number and therefore discourages people from even attempting CPR. What is optimal in a controlled environment doesn’t always translate to the real world.
Which brings us to swine flu.
Many companies have reached onto the dusty bookshelves and found the white binder with the Avian Flu Pandemic Communication Plan, or something else they cobbled together three years ago. It’s quite possible parts of that plan were copied over from the Incidents of National Significance Plan, or whatever your HR people called it so the word “terrorism” wouldn’t scare people in the title.
You need to blow off more than the dust; it’s time to update that plan to reflect the world we live in now. First, the essential premises:
Your old plans didn’t incorporate Twitter and blog searches. Under ordinary circumstances, these tools can be important for people who want to quickly share information. But they can also be hazardous in spreading incorrect advice with lightning speed. It’s not enough to be up to date; people want to be up to the minute.
Count on your employees to want that sort of immediacy in messaging, and their desire to seek sources other than your “official” corporate messaging. Help them feed that need by recommending sites you know will be accurate, starting with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Consider spooling links from those sources into an RSS feed that dynamically refreshes with the latest headlines, so employees won’t forage outside the ‘trusted zone’ to feel better.
Most importantly, set the expectations early about what you will communicate, when you will send it, and what sources your organization uses to inform your corporate decisions.
Social media tools are amazing, and empower so many people. I have no doubt that at this moment there are dozens of efforts underway to help people suffering from Hurricane Gustav. Blogs, Ning communities, Twitter accounts, you name it.
So here’s the disclaimer. Before you give ANY personal information to ANYONE on the internet, do your due diligence:
There are many, many well-intentioned efforts. But all it takes is one or two enterprising scammers to create a free and untraceable account on a Social Network to wreak havoc and take advantage of internet trust.
Don’t allow desperation to make you a victim.
And in the future, make sure you have a robust communication plan for friends and family. Do your investigation of those channels before the storm strikes. David Stephenson has some excellent advice on how to use new media and personal tech to communicate during disasters. Of course, my former colleages at the American Red Cross are in the space as well, with an official newsroom on WordPress and accounts for news and family disaster inquiry on Twitter. There’s also a nice Ning community up.
Just use your head.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, disaster, disaster communications, Ning, American Red Cross, Twitter, WordPress, David Stephenson[/tags]
