Crisis communications: what do social media and jazz have in common?
Several years ago my brother treated me to a jazz concert. I remember being incredibly disappointed in how bored I was (even fell asleep). He, being an aficionado, thoroughly enjoyed himself. In the discussion that followed, I realized two things. The first was that jazz is esoteric – you need to have an understanding of what's going on to truly appreciate it. The second was that I really didn't like jazz and that what I thought was jazz was really the blues.
What's this got to do with social media? As I spend more time learning about social media, I'm beginning to realize that Twitter is a lot like jazz – it's pretty hard to appreciate it if you don't take the time to understand it. The aficionados think it's the best thing since sliced bread while the rest of us scratch our heads trying to decipher twitter-speak and figure out how to use a hash tag. Secondly, once you do begin to understand it, you begin to learn its limitations and find it may not really be what you're looking for to solve your crisis communications problems.
My point is that not all of us are going to take the time to learn the intricacies of jazz and, even if we do, we may not like it. The same is true of Twitter. It's a great tool for some but is not the answer for all. Let's continue to keep diversity in our crisis communications.
Twitter is definitely one of those, you get out of it what you’re willing to put into it sort of things. One of the things, for this casual user, that has brought me back to Twitter is the ability to list my feeds. I can pull up my news lists a couple times a day and see whats going on that’s definitely not being covered on the cable news. I don’t have much in the way of weather or emergency services, but I generally don’t have those concerns here.
Definitely. The more you use it, the more useful it becomes. The advent of aggregator programs like Tweetdeck or Ushadi are definitely expanding its usefulness. The question for emergency managers, though, is how many people will we be able to reach reliably in a crisis. As popular as it is, it’s still reaching only a small percentage of the public, hence my call for balance and not putting all our eggs in the social media basket.
How much are the Twitter feeds promoted before a crisis? I mean the weather guys here always remind viewers at the end of a report that you can get up-to-date information via Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps not only regular reminders that the emergency services have feeds but regular postings to those feeds might help. People tend to subscribe more when they see there is some regular-ish traffic to a feed. Also, if you can get connected to the local media and their Twitter lists, that would expand the follower base and help boost the signal.
Ah, you’ve actually put your finger on the problem. The feeds I’ve seen tend to be one-sided and irregularly updated. They also tend to get neglected during a real crisis. We’re still using the old government mindset of providing information and distrusting citizen reports rather than attempting to be part of a dialogue. We’ve still got a long way to go!