Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

What if you used Twitter to call for help? Coast Guard discussion of liability and social media

July 8, 2009

The US Coast Guard has earned a well deserved reputation for public information management, and now this includes leadership in the use of social media. This has been led by the Commandant himself and eagerly embraced by many in the Public Affairs community. We’ve been fortunate to feature some of these CG leaders on our Strategy Forum webinars.

But, the use of social media by agencies such as the US Coast Guard raises a number of interesting issues. This blog by Coastie Ryan Erickson goes into some detail in examining some of these challenges, as well as posing some potential solutions. The primary challenge he poses is the need to not only use outlets such as Twitter and Facebook to push info out, but also as listening devices. But how is this to be handled? And what happens if they really start to be used in this way and Tweeters (Twitterers?) use Twitter to call for help? It’s not a hypothetical question apparently.

What if in this hurricane season there are a number of victims stranded and the only way of communicating about their need for assistance is through Twitter? We do believe that use of text messaging for this kind of two way notification, calls for help, status confirmation is very important. It’s why we’ve added text-to-inquiries capabilities in version 6.2 of PIER.

Every public agency charged with public safety is going to have to come to grips with the challenge identified by the Coast Guard. Our means of communication are changing–and that includes calls for help. The issue of legal liability will quickly emerge. I suspect that the typical response of many in emergency management of, “Uhhh, what’s Twitter?” will not be an acceptable defense.

Timesonline interview with my favorite blogger–Ashley Rodriguez

July 8, 2009

OK, I’m a very proud dad–proud of all three of my grown children. But today is a special day with the Timesonline featuring an interview of my daughter Ashley Rodriguez talking about her now famous food blog Not Without Salt.

I’d like to think she got some of her interest in and writing abilities from me, but she has far surpassed me in that area now. I do know for certain that she got her talent and passion for food and beauty from my beautiful and talented wife.

Congrats, Ash! Keep it up!

The JIC and Snopes

June 30, 2009

I’ve got a few friends who keep sending these jokes and internet messages–you know, the kind that say send this to five gazillion of your friends or something really bad will happen to you. Very often the messages include urban legends–like the one I got the other day about cell phones causing popcorn to pop. Very convincing. Had links to videos showing these people putting three or four cell phones aimed at a few kernels of popcorn. They made the phones ring and wait, wait, yes! the corn started popping. Of course, the comments on the email trail sounded very concerned–if this is the kind of radiation these things put out, no wonder people are dying of brain tumors from cell phones!

Well, I went to snopes to check it out and sure enough, along with the legend of cell phone cooking eggs, there was the legend of popcorn. False. Snopes is a wonderful thing. I advised my friend who sent this to me, as I have advised several others, before passing these things on it is good to check them with snopes. Saves some real embarrassment.

What does this have to do with the JIC?

I’m up to my eyeballs in writing EPIA (Emergency Public Information Annex) including detailed JIC plans. If anybody believes in the JIC and its value I do. But I am concluding that as much as we try to put in place the processes that will allow the JIC to put out emergency information to the public very fast, it will never be fast enough in this world. The media and the informed public will ALWAYS go to the most immediate information. That’s exactly why Twitter is so popular right now. Nothing beats the immediacy of someone who just saw a plane crash and is tweeting and twitpicing the image. Even the fastest JIC can’t beat an eyewitness with a text message or a video. So if you can’t beat or even meet the speed of news about an incident, and the mass media and a good part of the public will go to whoever has the most up to date information, will the JIC even survive? As I have said repeatedly recently to clients and in presentations–be fast or be irrelevant. Is the JIC destined to irrelevancy because it can’t match the speed?

I don’t think so. I think the answer is snopes. Crisis communicators and emergency management PIOs (Public Information Officers) have always struggled with the inherent conflicts between speed and accuracy. The conventional wisdom has always been accuracy above all. It make sense because credibility is everything–lose that and the game is up. But the public and media operate on immediacy–speed trumps all (I date this to the 2000 elections and it has only gotten worse since then). Snopes focuses on accuracy. It is THE authoritative source on urban legends. While the inaccuracy of information on the internet is generally known and accepted, sites and services like snopes exist to create some sense of security that the truth can be known. Mainstream media are struggling with this as well and while tilting toward speed, some are thankfully very concerned about maintaining their credibility.

While I think that speed is still terribly important for the JIC, accuracy should trump all. I believe that only completely verified information should be approved and released BUT in the meantime, PIOs should be communicating what is known at that time. Rumor management becomes one of the most important–and may eventually become the primary–tasks of the JIC. Because when a major incident is happening it is completely certain now that a lot of people (citizen journalists if you will) will be providing immediate information. Some of it true, some of it false. The media and the public need someplace to go to verify the facts. They need, in effect, a snopes for the response. Someplace to separate rumor from truth. Those inside the response should have access to the most relevant facts about the event and the response. That is the job of the Situation Unit.

But the process of identifying rumors, checking facts, verifying the information to be released and then getting timely approval for the release of it is critically important. Evenif the JIC is not first with the information, if there is too much a time delay between the initial faulty or unverified reports and verified information, the JIC will still quickly become irrelevant.

Speed and accuracy–still the drivers. But the dynamics of social media are definitely changing the rules of the game and how it is played.

Twitter, Iran elections and the death of a pilot

June 18, 2009

A few hours ago I was on a flight from Kennedy airport in New York to Seattle. CNN was carrying “Breaking News” during an hour or so of that flight about a Continental Airlines flight coming from Europe to Newark airport. During the flight, the captain had died of natural causes and now CNN was covering the “drama” live of whether or not the First Officer who had “commandeered the plane” (in their words) would be able to bring it down safely. Well, duh, he’s got 1500 hours in the 777, but never mind that. Aside from wanting to make a point about the ridiculous lengths today’s cable TV will go to dramatize an on-going incident, this comment is about Twitter. In the middle of their “dramatic” coverage of this ‘breaking news” story, they pulled up a screen with a Twitter search site, and the reporter said “just a few minutes ago, this story was one of the biggest on Twitter, oops, wait, now it is the biggest story on Twitter, it just bumped th Iranian elections off the top spot!”

Well, I may not be quoting exactly, but I just want to catch my breath and think about this for a moment.

There is little question of the role of the Internet, social media sites and Twitter in particular in the Iranian election crisis and our ability to learn in real time what is going on. Twitter has become so significant in this that the State Department (according to this article in Washington Post) asked Twitter to delay a scheduled maintenance window in order to not disrupt the way in which Twitter was impacting the protests as well as enabling all of us to see first hand what is going on there.

What do we call this phenomenon? What is this–the Sixth Estate? China is doing its very darndest and a darn good job at that of grabbing control of the Internet in order to keep the party in control and political protest from spiralling out of control. No doubt the cleric leaders are right now huffing and puffing with their technology gurus and yelling at them–do a China, do a China! But the cat may be out of the bag.

Hey presidents, dictators, party leaders and theocratic clerics–news flash: the citizens are free. Fear Twitter! This is the age of public permission, this is the age of transparency, this is the age of citizen journalism, social networking, instant news and public opinion getting out of your control before you have a chance to dial your attorney. I should have mentioned powerful CEO in that list, because that is where this lesson really needs to resonate.

Lessons from this rambling?

1) the news media now determines the level of interest in their news stories by Tweets

2) Governments who wish to control their people had better figure out how to get control of the means of communication–and that usually doesn’t work out too well.

Twitter to add verified accounts–while denying it has a problem

June 8, 2009

I love the way Twitter refused to acknowledged it has a problem with fake Twitter accounts, even while admitting that it was working on a way to fix the problem. Twitter was sued by St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa over a fake Twitter account and here’s how co-founder Biz Stone responded:

“With due respect to the man and his notable work, Mr. La Russa’s lawsuit was an unnecessary waste of judicial resources bordering on frivolous, ” Stone wrote in a post that went up Saturday. “Twitter’s Terms of Service are fair and we believe will be upheld in a court that will ultimately dismiss Mr. La Russa’s lawsuit.”

Fake Twitter accounts are a real problem–particularly in the area of Twitter use where I am most concerned and that is crisis and emergency response communications. In one drill recently where I served as part of “Truth” or the Simulation Cell, I provided and inject where a local Twit set up a Twitter account posing as the local Joint Information Center, then proceeded to give all kinds of false information. It caused a bit of head scratching in the JIC trying to figure out how to put a stop to that. They asked me–can’t we just ask Twitter to shut it down? Nope. No can do. (First off, ever try to actually talk to someone at Twitter about a customer service problem? Yeah, right.)

So while I am glad they are going to make this a little less of a problem with the “verified account” seal of approval, I got a big kick out of the way they announced it. Seems in the age of transparency lawyers are still hanging in the background driving messages. It’s the only reason I can possibly come up with for the snarky attack on Tony LaRussa (bordering on frivolous?  Hey Mr. Stone, do you want people out there pretending to be you with no way of stopping them?) even while promising to fix the problem. I can hear the discussion:

“You can’t come out and announce a fix to fake accounts when we have this lawsuit going, the plaintiff’s attorney will rip you apart.”

“But we got to fix the problem–these fake accounts are hurting our brand.”

“We have to dissociate the announcement from the lawsuit.”

“Ok, how about we talk about how ridiculous it is and that we will win and cry “frivolous.” That way we will fool people into thinking we think there is no problem.”

“Sure, that should work.”


Beyond social media–getting back to basics

June 4, 2009

I confess, like most others in public relations, I have been completely caught up in the whirlwind around social media and its impact on public relations, marketing and crisis management. But once in a while you have to step back and say what is really important here? How does this fit in the bigger picture of business and organizational momentum and even beyond that, to personal life issues?

I’ve been at the marketing, business development, strategic planning, public relations and crisis management game for over 30 years. I look back over the more-than-wonderful experience I have had of working with executives and leaders from small one person shops to executives of some of the largest corporations and government agencies in the world. And I will tell you that experience that there is one word that is far and beyond the most important word in defining success: relationships.

We live in a high tech world the scope of which I could never have imagined in the late 1970s when I ended my college teaching career and began my business career in communications and software. But John Naisbitt was absolutely right when he connected high tech and high touch. The more we move into a technology driven world, he said, the more there would be demand for the personal interactions that lie at the heart of commerce and all of life. The business of living and the life of business is about people. That is equally true of government agencies. When things work well you can invariably point to a remarkably small number of very high value relationships that operate at the heart of that success. When things don’t go well, it is because those key relationships are weak, broken or missing.

I say remarkably few for a reason. In 1997 I wrote a book–now out of print–called Friendship Marketing which focused on this issue of strategic relationships. I did informal research in talking to literally hundreds of businesses–frequently at conferences where I was speaking and asked them this question: How many relationships does your business absolutely depend on so that if you were to lose one of them it would cause you to lose sleep at night. I won’t keep you in suspense. I came to a magic number and that number is 6. Sure there are examples where the number is more than that–but it always, always ended up being a number that was shocking to the person providing the information because of how small it really was.

The meaning for the marketing and business development strategy that I advised was simple. If you depend now on a very small number of key relationships and you know that if you grow to ten or 100 times your current size, you will still depend on a remarkably few very important people, who might they be? You can identify them. By name. You can find them. You can find their contact information. You can find where they go to dinner, play golf, go to church. These people are reachable. Some easier than others obviously, but the point is you can find them and identify them. The power of this for marketing is absolutely immense and I can tell you stories of how that concept played out in marketing strategies I recommended.

But this is about crisis management. I always start in talking with a client about their preparations or their response capability by asking: who are the people whose opinion about you matters most for your future? For a federal agency, that answer may very well be key members of a Congressional committee who decides on agency funding. More to the point, it probably comes to key staff people of the Senators or Congress members who sit on that committee. For a non-profit it probably comes down to key donors and those who influence the key donors. For a business it certainly includes critical customers but also shareholders, key managers, their families, regulators, and perhaps leaders in the community where they operate. It is usually not difficult to come up with a list of 50, 25 or even 6 people who really matter a lot to the future.

The fact that this kind of strategy does not typically play into public relation’s peoples thinking about crisis preparation continues to surprise me. The mantra I have been repeating about crisis preparation is this: fast, direct, transparent. When I say direct, I mean DIRECT to those whose opinion matters most of the future of the organization.

Social media? Important yes, but I am believing it is more and more a huge distraction from the real business of building brands and reputation management which is far more effective and fundamental. The real business is identifying those strategic relationships, evaluation the value they place on you and what you do, and doing all you can to strengthen that relationship even while you define the key relationships you need for your future.

(By the way, I want to thank my wife for helping me pull back a bit and focus on what is important here. I love you hon.)

Taking transparency too far: webcasting brain surgeries

May 27, 2009

As this New York Times story comments, twittering during surgery is one thing, but doing a live webcast of brain surgery is taking things one step too far. We always knew there would be a line, but this is one that should not be crossed as far as I’m concerned.

More survey results–media and business at the bottom of confidence measures

May 20, 2009

Here’s another survey that shows what most of us already know and has been discussed on this blog quite a bit: the “public” doesn’t much like, trust or have confidence in our major institutions. What’s surprising in this study is not necessarily the abysmally low numbers, but the rankings to see who is even a little better than others.

Here’s a quick summary showing those reporting a “high level of confidence” in:

Media — 5%

Corporations — 8%

Government — 23%

Small Business  — 40%

Churches — 50%

The question I have is what have the media and big business done to themselves to warrant these incredibly low numbers?

What’s happening to the news and what will it become?

May 19, 2009

You have to be living under a rock to not be aware that we are living in one of the largest shifts in media, public information and news. The speed of the transition is probably unprecedented. Will newspapers go away forever? Will radio, cable tv and local television news survive; if they do, in what form? The Economist this week has an article called “The Rebirth of News.” While the headline is far more optimistic than the content of the article would warrant, there are some very significant aspects of the change that are revealed.

- As major papers like the Seattle PI and San Francisco Chronicle go under, “people under 30 won’t even notice.”

- Young people (18-24) according to Pew reporting they got any news the previous day dropped from 34% ten years ago to 25% today. Does this mean young people aren’t getting news and don’t care what is going on? I doubt it. But I would guess than the “news” or relevant information they get is being mediated now not so much by major news outlets but through the complex network of social interactions that this group has through social media tools. Watching fast breaking stories roll through Twitter is revealing.

- Major news outlets still have not figured out a new business model that will sustain them as the old print and broadcast products go away. Wall Street Journal may be closest by offering the flashy, general info free but charging a premium for more specific, high interest categories.

- Mircopayments, now being explored on many fronts, may offer some hope.

- Enhanced mobile devices optimized for reading such as new iphones and Amazon’s Kindle may breathe some life into traditional journalism (but I doubt a whole lot)

Overall, I think the Economist downplayed the most significant thing happening in news–the democratization of journalism. While many decry it and it has some very significant downsides as lack of accountability, but there are some significant upsides as well. We have seen in active blog and wikipedia that when a broadbase group gets involved, the truth will emerge from the process. Maybe like making sausage but while the process may be ugly, I happen to really like sausage–the result is quite good.

Another point missed here is that a new form of professional journalist has emerged. There are now more than 400,000 people in the US making a living as bloggers. Those are 400,000 new paid “journalists” — not only that but there are millions of new news or information outlets. It is segmentation of the media to the extreme.

While the outlines of the shift are becoming more clear, what is not is what it really means for all of us. How is this affecting who we are and how we interact with each other? Do these changes work to bring us closer into community or do they work to divide us further? How does the new way we get our news impact our opinions and decision making about political choices, consumer choices and lifestyle choices? These are the interesting questions to me but I haven’t seen a lot of prognostication or analysis about it–yet. Any thoughts?

Testing Email posting

May 12, 2009

WordPress added a feature where you can make direct blog posts via email. This is my test. If this shows up on crisisblogger you know it works, and it is pretty darn slick.

(Edited version–it worked great, just had to remove the signature which is supposed to automatically removed. Need to check into that.)