My Other Brother

Posted on April 18, 2007 Written by 3 Comments

Didn’t know I had yet another one out there. And no, this is not an indictment of my parents for “not telling me something.”

I’ve recently started swapping e-mails and conversations with a fellow communicators – a nice guy named Michael Sommermeyer. He works for the courts in Las Vegas, and it turns out we have a heck of a lot more in common than either of us knew.

I don’t write about “Social Media” and “Social Networking” and “Web 2.0″ stuff for a host of reasons. There’s already a lot of it out there, and it’s not in my ordinary bailiwick. Also, what it out there is typically narcissistic, navel-gazing, and highly speculative. Besides, if you can communicate clearly, it doesn’t matter what tool you use. But, if it weren’t for playing around experimenting with these tools, I wouldn’t have met Sommermeyer. [Read more...]

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Juggling Act

Posted on March 2, 2007 Written by 1 Comment

What’s more challenging than running a real-time online newsroom for an American Red Cross disaster relief operation?

Running two of them.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, American Red Cross, tornadoes, Alabama, Georgia[/tags]

Filed Under: Communication, Personal, Quick thoughts Tagged: ,

On the Road. Again.

Posted on February 3, 2007 Written by Leave a Comment

Oklahoma. Ice. Last week.

Florida. Tornados. This week.

American Red Cross. See the world, one disaster at a time.

It’s a shame I’m not yet signed up for frequent-flyer and hotel-rewards programs.

Filed Under: Personal, Quick thoughts Tagged: ,

Oklahoma is not OK

Posted on January 23, 2007 Written by 3 Comments

At least for me. I’ve been sick the bulk of my time here, and getting some things done from my room. But the coughing is getting worse, and I now have a headache. The nurses are coming to take me to an emergency room.

Update to come…

Update: 2:46 pm
Back in the room, using the coffeemaker to heat up the water to put in my Ramen cup…

As expected, I now have an antibiotic, a decongestant, and a cough medicine strong enough to put me down for a little bit. Thanks to everyone for the calls and well-wishes. Good news coming tomorrow, I promise…

Update #2: 9:59pm
I really need to take a hot bath, but there’s a break in a main up the street and I have no running water.

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On the Road

Posted on January 20, 2007 Written by Leave a Comment

Posting may be a little slow for a while.

I’m currently in Muskogee, Oklahoma, working on a disaster assignment for the American Red Cross.  We’re helping sustain sheltering and meals for a wide swath of Eastern Oklahoma, where winter storms have knocked out power for days now.

The power is nearly back on — but another storm is blowing in as I write this.

I may be slow to post here, but I am still blogging, technically.  We’ve set up a WordPress page (without comments) as a Media Alert center.  We’ll use this venue to push updates, alerts, announcements, and news releases.  (Just in case those aren’t all just flavors of the same thing.)

Check it out.

Filed Under: Communication, Personal Tagged:

Turducken

Posted on January 3, 2007 Written by 1 Comment

We recently added a new communicator in our Red Cross regional office. He’s a great guy, assigned to support the Hurricane Recovery Program. I’ve known him a while and respected his work, and we recently had a chance to collaborate on promoting one phase of the long-term recovery efforts.

He wrote a brilliant release that we were going to distribute through our network of chapters: after all, it is important that those with the local media relationships should maintain them. It was at this point that we recognized a potential pitfall. “How do we make sure the chapters actually send the release?” [Read more...]

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