Here’s an interesting concept I heard about the other day that I’d love to see become a best practice.

You guys know I don’t like to talk about work, but something came up that was just too good not to share. During a recent citywide social media meeting (Wait, your city doesn’t have them? Maybe that should be today’s best practice.), we discussed a weekend when our social-media-loving Mayor didn’t have anything on his calendar, so he decided to personally respond to everyone who reached out to him on Twitter. (Look around your office. If anyone who works in Communications' jaw is on the floor, they’re probably reading this right now.) Everyone. In most places this would be a great thing (and I think it was a great thing here, too), but in a city of 1.5 million generally cranky and sometimes contentious residents, it can get a bit hinky. Rest assured, we as a government survived. But we, thanks to our Mayor, also learned a valuable lesson: he doesn’t know everything that’s happening in our city.

For a Mayor like ours, who likes to be hands-on and give the right answer the first time, you can understand how frustrating this must’ve been. So, we came up with a plan to have all of us in each of the Departments check in on the tweets directed at our Mayor. If there was something that fell under our purview (Health for me, Parks for another fellow, Licenses and Inspections yet another, etc.) that the Mayor didn’t already address, we were given carte blanche to answer the question. No approval needed, no coordination through myriad channels necessary. If you’ve got the answer, give it. We weren’t provided with schedules, no assignments given; just check in when you get a chance. True social media spirit.

This is an important tactic for a variety of reasons. First, and maybe most importantly, it takes the burden of being the City’s everything off of the Mayor. He is high visibility, so everyone knows his Twitter account and reaches out to him first. Then he’s presented with the choice of ignoring constituents or repeating his “Ask Me Anything” weekend. No good choice there. Maybe just as important, though, is that allows the public to see that our City government is more than just a Mayor and his handlers. It’s real-life experts who spend all day thinking about that question you just asked. It’s real customer service. (Key point: serving the customer/constituent in the format and fashion that they request—huge.) And in today’s economy, proving that your job is important and necessary is a big bonus. Finally, by actively participating in the Mayors' very popular feed, those smaller, more specific Twitter accounts and users get the kind of visibility they can’t pay for. Win, win, win!

(And as for those trite downsides: speaking for the Mayor and the lack of approvals? Every person on an official City Twitter account is speaking for the Mayor all day long already. He’s the one responsible at the end of the day, so why not let him benefit from that relationship by relieving some of the burden? And unless your Mayor already approves each tweet now… Well, you’ve got bigger problems if that’s the case.)

If you follow the tech blogging community at all, you’ll have heard of Pinterest. If you don’t follow that community, and you haven’t heard of it already from a friend, family member or co-worker, you will soon enough. It is officially the hot new thing.

Intended to simulate the look and feel of a corkboard (the site calls it a pinboard), Pinterest is a digital place to save and display images meaningful to you, with a link back to the source. Pictures of cute puppy dogs to make you smile, skinny people to remind you to put down the (second) cupcake, inspirational quotes, etc. The social media part of this is that you can see everyone else’s board, and can pin stuff from their boards to your own board. What an amazing way to learn more about someone; you can see everything that they find important.

And Pinterest is making headlines. Even as an invite-only website (which is a hugely clever way to ensure that people joining the site have ready-made friends on there, so there’s never that element of, “so now what do I do,” that bedevils sites like Twitter), Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn. COMBINED. That alone would get headlines, but there’s one more interesting part to this equation. By far, the majority of Pinterest users are women. In the U.S., some statistics have the figure at 87% of active users.

So, naturally, I wanted to know more, both for personal and professional reasons. (So I asked my wife for an invite.) What I found was that there’s really nothing girly about the site. It functions just like my magnetic whiteboard at work, with all kinds of important or interesting pictures hanging from it. Then after pinning a bunch of tattoo pictures and Star Wars stuff (or you could do like Chief Boyd and post lots of motorcycle pics and man caves and prove that you’ve got way more guy cred than I have), I started thinking about work and how we, as communicators, could use this new medium in an emergency.

And I failed.

Really smart folks like Patrice Cloutier and Karen Freberg and Gerald Baron are convinced that Pinterest can be a useful way to communicate in an emergency, but I just don’t see it yet. I think that ultimately they’ll be proven right, but that doesn’t mean that Pinterest can’t be useful for those in our field right now. But instead of after or during, before.

Take, for example, this great pinboard by the wonderful folks at APHL (the Association of Public Health Labs). They’re using it essentially as a self-directed teaching site. For those of us in specialized fields that aren’t really well understood, like public health labs, like public health, like emergency management, like fire fighting, like policing, like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. What an amazing way to demonstrate, in those thousand-word-pictures, what we’re all about. In these times of austerity, what a better way to demonstrate why the work you do is important.

And one final note for my public health readers. It’s known that women (specifically mothers) are the chief medical decision-makers for families in the U.S. And that the percent of medical decision-makers searching online for health information continues to rise. And now you know that the largest reported age group in the U.S. on Pinterest are women aged 35 to 44. So if you wanted to influence medical decision-makers about things like, say, vaccines, where do you think might be a good place to do it?

(With an eyeball-grabbing headline like that, I’d better bring the stick, right?)

I’ll guess that most of you who know me would bet that this post will be about the lack of social media utilization by communicators as why the headlines have been filled with “communications disasters” in the last year plus. But you’d be wrong. Many of those disasters had a social media component in the response, some of them significant. (You can get into the tactical part of those responses and question if they could have been done better, but that’s not a fault I would call pervasive.)

I would argue that most of those so-called “communications disasters” are little more than operational disasters masquerading as communications failures. Look at the list of Top Ten Crises of 2011 pulled together by the Holmes Report:

• TEPCO
• News Corp
• Penn State
• Blackberry
• Dow Chemical
• Netflix
• Sony
• HP
• Qantas
• European Central Bank

Now, I’m not so naive as to think that there wasn’t significant public relations complicity in some of these situations. But each of them were operational disasters dropped into the laps of the communications team who were told, “Deal with this,” or worse, “Don’t say a word.” And now they’ve been excoriated by an outfit like the Holmes Report. I’m willing to bet that next year’s list will include the unfolding Komen/Planned Parenthood disaster. The Komen PR team will likely get strung up for being obstinate and non-communicative, for authorizing statements that ran counter to reality and for generally bungling the reputation of one of the country’s most reputable brands.

The thing is, I think that’s generally unfair. Taking the Komen situation as my example, I’m willing to bet that the decision to cut funding to Planned Parenthood was made without the input of the PR team. And frankly, there’s no way to gussy up that pig, lipstick or no. In fact, at the time the decision was made (late last year), Komen was in the middle of a corporate restructuring that caused them to lay off their Senior Communications Advisor, John Hammarley.

The organization was in such turmoil at the time that Komen hired former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer to supervise a search for a new Senior Vice President for Communications and External Relations. During the interviews, Fleischer specifically asked about the candidates' feelings on the Planned Parenthood situation. In short, at a time when the Communications Department was undergoing significant change and losing institutional knowledge and relationships, the leadership was preparing for the upcoming disaster. I think it goes without saying that the leadership was directing this process, and building a Communications Department to fit their plans. (That the new Senior VP and restructured Department did a poor job is simply an expected outcome of the piss-poor strategy.) (And just between you and me, I wonder about the restructuring going on at the same time that the leadership was pressing to institute a policy that no PR team could cover; a coincidence?)

So the greatest (ongoing) failure of communicators? Continuing to allow major policy decisions to be made without their input. Cowing to leadership that seems set upon steering the agency/corporation into the rocks. Would you blame the helmsman who followed Admiral Farragut’s order to “Damn the torpedoes,” if ultimately the gambit failed?

And I’m not the only person who sees this failure. Smart folks who do this type of thinking for real see it, too. Gerald Baron. Richard Edelman. Bill Salvin (I took Bill’s point in this post as communicators need to be brought into the loop—fully—as soon after a crisis occurs as possible, in order to help guide policy and craft both operational and PR response).

Maybe this way of conducting PR/PI/PA makes sense in a world of old media, where you had hours to craft a response and bring in your PR team to lipstick up your pig before tomorrow’s edition. In today’s 24/7 media (I’ve taken to calling it a 10-second media landscape, as that’s the longest it takes to write and publish a tweet), every second that your PIO doesn’t know what’s going on, your organization falls further behind the curve. Every interview they give that’s full of holding statements damages your credibility. Bill Salvin demonstrates what that delay means anymore:

I first realized this was going to be a problem back in 2009 when US Airways ditched into the Hudson River. People started tweeting about it immediately. We watched the plane floating down the river on one side of the screen as US Airways President Doug Parker used a template to “confirm there has been an incident.” The statement was delivered 96 minutes after the plane hit the river. It seemed it took forever to get that statement and that was three years ago.

Bringing your PR team or PIO into planning meeting after it happens means you’re already behind the eight ball. Having them as a key planning partner before it happens ensures your organization is leaning forward and might get a chance to smear some lipstick on before the cameras go on (or maybe even convince leadership not to put a pig out there in the first place).

Phenomenal job on looking at how bp conducted crisis communications,
with a special focus on how new technologies, like websites and Skype,
are impacting the jobs of PIOs.