The preliminary findings of the Public Inquiry into the Elliott Lake Mall Collapse leads to a communications shortfall.
The Elliott Lake Public Inquiry is getting it correct. Much of the frustration both Elliott Lake community members and the broader Ontario audience experienced, resulted from lack of implementing an up-to-date emergency communications strategy.
As the preliminary findings of the public inquiry indicate, there was not skilled communications personnel on site or on the emergency response team in the Elliott Lake community when needed most…at the onset, during the response, and in the recovery of this disaster.
Both municipal governments and emergency managers need to take note of these findings. Your reputation is at stake when you fail to meet the fast paced demands by the community when such incidents occur.
Gone are the days of ‘issuing a news release’ and all will be well. The convergence of social media and smart phone technology has thrown the media cycle timetable out the door with yesterday’s trash. Sadly, local government, emergency managers and much of the broader emergency response community have still to learn this simple truth.
I’m posting the following CBC North news clip for your reference…it’s well worth a listen!
Time is a luxury no incident commander or PIO can afford. There are now four key imperatives when a disaster or emergency occurs:
Why those four critical actions? Because, to put it simply, it’s what your audiences and stakeholders expect nowadays.
Responding: the scrutiny is now intense and immediate. And the judgment passed on your response also includes how fast you communicate. People will have different views on your actions …. Positive or negative. One thing is sure: if you rely as the traditional media to distribute your crisis messaging, you’re doomed to irrelevancy.
Alerting: relevancy in the age of social convergence means SPEED. Speed is not the only thing … it’s EVERYTHING. That means moving at the speed of your audiences (the pace of Twitter and other social networks) to be relevant … and using mobile tools to reach them to have a chance to be heard at all …. What you’re aiming for is to insert yourself in the alerting and news networks that are created organically by people online when an incident occurs. It also means you’ve got to have a solid presence ahead of any crisis too. There are tools that can help, such as Ping4Alerts! who marry mobile and social effectively.
Monitoring: recent events in Boston, Kenya and in the Philippines have shown the great value of social listening during incidents as a source of situational awareness and a way to gauge the public perception of your response. Operationalizing that listening is essential for supporting effective decision-making. You must find a way to finding out how the incident is progressing by screening out the fluff and concentrating on what witnesses are putting out; detecting and countering false rumours and defending your reputation. Next you must collate and analyze this info and feed it back into your command or ops structure in a way in can be used in real-time. A challenge for sure, but now eminently feasible and necessary. I like using a mix of Hootsuite and Tweetdeck for the listening part, Google docs for reports and Crowdmap for simple, easy-to-update maps.
Engaging: public alerting and warnings are one thing. But they are only the start of the comms continuum during incidents. Our audiences now demand constant updates. Does your PIO have the ability to keep sending out info? Either technical capabilities or the necessary authority? Now ensure you have linkages inside your social media listening teams to ensure that posts that should be answered get prioritized and acted upon.
After all, if the bad guys are listening to social chatter … shouldn’t you?
Now, the real hard part is that all of the four elements of the incident/crisis comms plan have to be implemented/conducted almost simultaneously. Again, time is a luxury no PIO can afford any longer.
]]>Recent events have again demonstrated the absolute necessity for organization to monitor social media during incidents or crises. This goes well beyond using social media as a communications tool (althought it’s a great start). The mall attack in Kenya has given another (albeit a rather unpleasant one) argument for the benefits of active social listening.
It’s not only the bad guys that get this … The Boston bombings earlier this year highlighted the effective use of social networks by local authorities..
It’s simpl,e really. News breaiks on Twitter … comments and opinions … witness accounts, follow almost instantly … as we saw with what happened in Washington near the Capitor Building today.
Other organizations recognize the need to monitor social media to gather more info and get a better operational picture. Frankly, they either do this or run the risk of being marginalized.
I had the opportunity in the last few months to lead a project on behalf of Agincourt Strategies, and collaborating with two key experts (Gerald Baron and Bill Boyd), to provide a social media monitoring training program for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
It’s now an imperative for organizations in all fields, public or private, to have the ability to stay abreast, minute by minute, of any crisis. To do so, they must monitor social media and for the following five reasons:
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