What YouTube Direct means for the post-media world

The movement toward a true post-mainstream media world took another big leap forward with the announcement last week of YouTube Direct. There’s been lots of talk, including on this blog, about how the 300 million plus people walking around with smartphones are the electronic newsgathering network of today. And how the news outlets such as CNN and CBS and trying increasingly hard to tap into this network of citizen journalists. YouTube brilliantly just made it a lot easier. While I confess I haven’t looked at it in detail it looks a bit like combining YouTube downloading capability with some HARO (Help a Reporter Out) functionality. So someone with a cell video camera can capture something stunning like Tom Cruise jumping on a couch over his new love or houses floating by on a flooded river and immediately post that to YouTube, where it can the be easily accessed by media, bloggers or anyone else to share. Also, those looking for video on specific topics can request it or search and those with them can submit directly. That seems to be the idea as I understand it.

What this means of course is more access by anyone who is interested to the videos and information they want.  The implications for crisis and emergency management professionals is significant. Now more than ever when you respond, the story will be told already. The chances of getting the first word in are remote–unless you completely control the exposure, such as if you are David Letterman and decide you will reveal the sordid facts and not leave it to someone else. If you don’t control the first hint of what is going on, then by the time you can respond, the world–at least those most interested–will be already receiving a stream of relevant info. The real question for crisis managers and emergency responders is how do you manage an event when everyone who cares very well knows more than you do? That to me is the big question that we will be struggling with in the coming years.

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Internet traffic–Jackson tests the limits

One question that ought to be always on the minds of crisis managers is how much traffic can your website take? As it becomes more clear the critical role that the internet plays in emergency public information (such as Hurricane Ike), understanding the traffic limits on the internet is of great importance to emergency response planners. So, how much can it take and how can we know?

The Michael Jackson death will serve as a benchmark for some time to come, as 9/11 did for some time after that event. According to the article in the July 6 NYT, traffic on news websites at around 6 pm (ET) hit around 4.2 million per minute. Yes, per minute. If that traffic were sustained, that would be 250 million hits per hour. I was conducting training with a group of PIER users at our offices in Bellingham and when the first hint came out (someone was checking email during training of course) immediately everyone hit TMZ and whatever news sites we could find. It was fascinating for this group of senior communication managers to watch the events unfold (Twitter Breaking News On beat the LA Times by half an hour with the news of his death). But we were a roomful of people crowding the news sites with our smart phones and laptops.

The impact of this kind of traffic was substantial. Wikipedia broke the record for visits to a single article in a one hour period (one million, plus the quarter million who went to the misspelled entry “Micheal Jackson.”

AIM went down for 40 minutes according to the NYT article and a number of sites experienced significant slowing. Some search terms on Google News were significantly slowed.

This kind of internet traffic reminds me a little of a greeting card I saw this weekend while strolling the streets of Anacortes, Washington. It had a picture of a cruise ship on its side with the caption something like: “The captain knew it was a mistake when the cruise director announced a sighting of Elvis Presley off the starboard side.” What will it take to capsize the ship of the internet. The overall message is, it will take a lot. The resilience of the internet as a communications channel is truly remarkable owing ultimately to its fundamental design as a spider web of connections. Still, it has its limits. Almost every site has its limits, every application, every web service. Knowing those limits, preparing to deal with them–even while building capacity needs to be the concern of everyone in crisis communication or emergency response planning. While some may think the passing of a pop star is the biggest, most important thing to ever happen, I can think of a few more items that could bring even this resilient means of communication to its knees.

The biggest gap in emergency response communication

I’ve been at this game of crisis management and emergency response communications for over ten years now–at least where that has been a primary focus. There is one problem that keeps coming up over and over and over. And the rapid changes in the last couple of years have only made this problem greater and the damage caused by it more significant.

The gap is simple: It is what Incident Commanders and emergency response leaders don’t know and understand about the public information environment.

Ultimately, they are the ones who make the decisions during a crisis or emergency response. They have many many important decisions to make and precious little time to make them. When lives are on the line, when minutes count in a response, it is little wonder they tend to have little patience for getting into a discussion about the pros and cons of web content and whether or not to set up a Twitter feed for the Joint Information Center.

I have to admit to being very frustrated with this problem–particularly because it is nigh unto impossible to get Incident Commanders or Crisis Team Leader or CEOs to pay any attention to this gap in advance of an incident. Participate in training? No way. And I was quite surprised and disappointed that my effort to address this topic at a major conference on oil spill management was rejected. If conference managers and presentation review panels don’t understand how important it is to help Incident Commanders understand their operating environment better, then how can the ICs be expected to pay attention.

There seems to be only one proven method of changing this–experience. Unfortunately, going through a major event and learning from that what the media, stakeholders and internal audiences expect and demand from the response leadership seems to be the only way to close that gap. As one experienced crisis communicator told me, he can tell immediately whether or not an incident commander has been through a real event. The difference in their understanding of and the need for fast, direct, transparent communication is profound.

Great listing of Emergency Management and Crisis Blogs

Here’s a blog that Google Alerts found for me with a great listing of blogs talking about emergency management, crisis preparation, etc. I found it of course, because it lists my blog. That’s how this social media thing works. Round and round.

New Study shows Emergency Managers slow to understand communication changes

If there was one overwhelming theme at the Nov 3 Risk and Crisis Communications conference in DC it was that the world of information has changed and that those involved in communicating with the public have to change with it. So obvious, but so desperately unresolved. Here’s a new study from the University of Kansas which quite plainly says the people most responsible for communicating in major events don’t get it. This study comes from the Firestorm Inc newsletter–worth getting.

One thing I and others I talked to were stunned about at this conference in DC and that was the very old and outdated thinking about the media. There was much talk including from some very respectable media folks speaking about the need to partner with the media–by which they mean the old media. Now, I agree that building relationships with the diminishing breed of old style journalists is still very important and that you have to communicate your information and messages to the media in an event. But partner? I tried to point out in my session that the media’s overwhelming concern, understandable in the crisis they are in, is to build an audience. They do this by fault finding, placing blame, and heightening the public’s sense of fear. That is their job. Yes, they can convey important messages. But in this era of instant news, social media, Web 2.0 and all that stuff, most people expect to get critical information directly–via website, emails, social media sites, blogs, YouTube, text messages, phone messages, alert devices, etc.

As Neil Chapman points out in his comment about his participation in this conference–an outstanding contributor I might add–is that we who are in communication have an urgent task. We have to educate those who will make the critical decisions about what is going on. They can’t live under a rock any more. They have to wake up to the realities of Twitter, Facebook, instant news, media infotainment and all the rest. After a major event they will understand it much better. But by then, it will be too late to build trust.