Rick Russotti, from Mitigation Journal, tweeted me a question on my feelings about what’s going on in Italy. No, not that mess, this one:

Seven scientists and other experts went on trial on manslaughter charges Tuesday for allegedly failing to sufficiently warn residents before a devastating earthquake that killed more than 300 people in central Italy in 2009.

Wait, what?

Yes, scientists are being prosecuted for not predicting the unpredictable. My initial feelings are that this is BS. Unfortunately, in the court of international justice, my feelings are obviously not taken into consideration. My concerns, as a result, lean towards the ripples that this event will cause. And boy do I worry about these ripples. Not so much because of the Italian situation, but because of this NOAA report on the Joplin tornado (PDF):

The vast majority of Joplin residents did not immediately take protective action upon receiving a first indication of risk (usually via the local siren system), regardless of the source of the warning. Most chose to further assess their risk by waiting for, actively seeking, and filtering additional information.

Did you get that? Residents were warned, and because of the poor effect of that warning, did not react in a protective manner. Almost like the Italian situation (not exactly, you understand, but close). People died because they chose not to heed the warning.

Now, what does that mean? Well, for us in the emergency warning and emergency public information world, LOTS. NOAA has come to the conclusion that the warnings employed immediately prior to an EF-5 tornado ripping through a town were ineffective. Throughout the Midwest and South, those very same systems are the primary means of warning people in the event of a tornado. See where this could be problematic? Now think about what this means in the context of what’s happening in Italy.

Wow.

Now, think about your emergency warning systems. How confident are you that they’ll be effective? And realize the difference between working and effectiveness. Your testing to make sure the system works may actually be making the system less effective.

Now, you know me, I like to propose solutions when I can, so here’s my best attempt. Review your current alerting systems. Write them all down. Honestly write down the pros and cons. Take, for example, your siren warnings. They’re familiar, and they work, but they’re also only auditory (so deaf folks, and people with their car stereos too loud, and people with headphones won’t get the warning), and they’re not made for people inside buildings to hear, and they tend to over-project the warning (tornadoes are only a tiny sliver of rotation, while a siren warns for miles), and they’re non-specific (a specific criticism in Finding #2a in the Joplin report), and well, they’re familiar and easily tuned out. Should this be your only means of warning the public? Probably not.

So, let’s get some more warning systems. I would argue the most important step is the aggressive implementation of a robust and constantly-manned social media and text-messaging presence (used in concert with all other forms of warning). Emergency warnings from these systems can be pushed to the phones (which are a great and growing presence in the pockets and purses of Americans), immediately alerting folks of dangers specifically (potential storm, rotation confirmed, funnel traveling down Second Avenue, etc.), and can be used as confirmatory messages (addressed in Finding #2d of the Joplin report) due to constant updates in emergency situations.

(As for the reliability of these tools, it is important to note that no system is infallible and may fail as infrastructure degrades or is overwhelmed. It’s a concern that is not special to text messaging or social media. In fact, more and more cases studies of recent disasters are showing the viability—if not reliability—of social media in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. In fact, as shown in this blog post from Google, Internet searches especially about a particular disaster are higher what you’d reflexively think in the affected area. People who have been in a disaster search for information on the disaster online.)

Since you’re here, you probably understand the need for integration of social media into emergency notification, so I really don’t have to sell you too much. But that one guy or gal, who’s probably in a key position, who doesn’t believe that social media can help, or is a waste of time, or is scary? Ask them if they’d rather start a Facebook page, or sit in court and defend the idea that their using an antiquated warning system does not make them guilty of manslaughter.

This is not a happy post, and it will not solve any problems. Sorry.

As many of our agencies begin using social media as a part of their outreach and public information work, we find that our PIOs and Communications Directors, who have always had a full plate, are having trouble finding the time to fully integrate social media into their day-to-day work. And that’s troublesome on a number of levels.

First, the only thing worse than NOT having a social media presence these days is having a presence that is moribund, out-of-date, silent. Many Directors and PIOs understand this and employ all manner of tricks and tips to post to all of the relevant social media networks. They utilize programs like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Ping.fm, and Dlvr.it to write a post and have that post propagate to all of the agencies' social media accounts. (For those who aren’t looking for ways to better integrate social media, for shame!)

Second, and newly discovered, is that those tricks and tips aren’t always the best way to do things. It turns out that Facebook (the most popular and highly trafficked social network in the world) penalizes posts that are submitted via third-party tools. From Adage.com:

A service called EdgeRank Checker revealed data this week that showed how using a third-party application — like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck — to update your Facebook Page decreases your engagement per fan (on average) by about 70%.

The study speculates that decrease in engagement could be due to one, or several, of the following reasons:

• Facebook penalizes third-party API’s EdgeRank
• Facebook collapses third-party API updates
• Scheduled or automated posts have potential for lower engagement
• The content is not optimized for Facebook

The first seems proprietary, and kind of “black box-y,” so I feel okay ignoring it. The rest I wholeheartedly agree with.

First up, the third and fourth on the AdAge list. When would you schedule your posts for if your audience was college-aged? Middle-aged mothers? Teenage boys who game? Please, please tell me that the answers aren’t all 8:30 to 3:30. if they are, you’re not adequately reaching your audience, so that’s why they aren’t engaging. Also, make sure that the message matches the medium. To limit oneself to 140 characters and no threading conversations (like on Twitter) when you’ve got Facebook’s 420 characters and ability to solicit responses is the same as leaving money on the table.

Finally, collapsing. I’ve seen this on my own Pages and account. The latest post will be displayed in full, with a link underneath that says something like, “See 3 more posts from Tweetdeck.” Clicking that gives access to all of your vetted, approved, rewritten, perfect posts. How many of your Facebook page fans will click that link? And even worse than that is that Facebook will collapse posts from different accounts based n which third-party tool submitted it. So, if your agency and three other Pages that you fan has liked use the same tool, it’s possible that your fans might never see your posts.

Scary!

And just yesterday, in anticipation of the upcoming Facebook conference, f8, word has come out that the company is revamping it’s famous News Feed. And the changes means tons for Page Administrators. TechCrunch says:

Facebook is rolling out an updated version of News Feed that does away with the two-tabbed interface that it’s had for two years now. Before now you’d have to swap between ‘Top Stories’ (a feed of stories that Facebook thought were important) and ‘Most Recent’ (a feed of your friends’ most recent actions on the site).

Facebook will now merge both types of content into the same feed, intelligently determining how much screen real estate to allocate to ‘Top Stories’ based on how recently you’ve logged into the site. If you’re checking Facebook ten times a day at work, then most of the items in your feed will be recent; if you’re logging in for the first time in the few days, Facebook will try to give you an overview of the most important things your friends have shared.

Does Facebook think that your posts are “Top Stories?” Well, if all of your posts are getting collapsed and are posted when none of your audience is looking, they probably won’t. And if that’s the case, well, what’s the point?

This social media thing, man, you’ve got to keep an eye on it.

danah boyd (yes, no capitals), who I believe is one of the top two or three smartest people in the whole world, has an amazing post up this week that really gave me pause. Guilt Through Algorithmic Association is a post very similar to the types of posts I write in that it brings up some really complex problem with no solution. It asks questions that have no good answers. It tickles your brain and ultimately leaves you more depressed about where our technology and world are taking us—if only because we haven’t yet though through all of the ramifications of our actions. But, man!, does it make you think.

Dr. boyd is an expert in young people’s issues and has relatedly become an expert in how young folks interact and live online. The subjects of her research generally place her on the bleeding edge of what’s next, what’s going to be a problem and how things that are seemingly good for society end up ostracizing the most vulnerable.

The Algorithm post is all about something similar to the old “googlebombing” trick from 2004. You remember the “waffle” thing for John Kerry and “miserable failure” thing for George W. Bush. To do that trick, a person had to actually change a website (using search engine optimization techniques) to influence the algorithm and produce the desired result. An identifiable person or group did something. This problem is much more subtle, and to the best of my understanding, a perpetrator-less crime. Dr. Boyd describes it thusly:

You’re a 16-year-old Muslim kid in America. Say your name is Mohammad Abdullah. Your schoolmates are convinced that you’re a terrorist. They keep typing in Google queries likes “is Mohammad Abdullah a terrorist?” and “Mohammad Abdullah al Qaeda.” Google’s search engine learns. All of a sudden, auto-complete starts suggesting terms like “Al Qaeda” as the next term in relation to your name.

See the difference? This isn’t a person slandering you, they’re just searching for you. The money line:

It’s one thing to be slandered by another person on a website, on a blog, in comments. It’s another to have your reputation slandered by computer algorithms. The algorithmic associations do reveal the attitudes and practices of people, but those people are invisible; all that’s visible is the product of the algorithm, without any context of how or why the search engine conveyed that information. What becomes visible is the data point of the algorithmic association. But what gets interpreted is the “fact” implied by said data point, and that gives an impression of guilt.

I make no effort to minimize Dr. boyd’s horrific scenario (which she says she’s heard real cases of), but worry about how something similar could happen to us, to our agencies. Imagine you’re responding to some emergency, disease outbreak, oil spill, wildland fire. Some members of the public, say locals, for whatever reason are unhappy about the response. They think you’re only focused on remediation in a way that benefits you (giving out vaccine, mass doses of dispersant, focus on rich neighborhoods) to the detriment of the general public. Enterprising bloggers start searching online for proof of a conspiracy. “Is the Mayor taking bribes?” “Does the vaccine cause autism?” Not posting, just searching. As interest in the situation grows, more and more people start to look for information online. They head to their favorite search engine and type in your agency name, and the auto-prompt suggests that you guys are taking bribes and giving autism and hate African-Americans. Even if you’re WAY ahead of the situation and have materials designed to combat that way of thinking, the first thing the public sees is your name tied to unsavory practices. The frame of reference has already been set.

The tricky part is that no one is at fault. An algorithm associated you with some level of guilt. No one did anything malicious or untowards. How can you possibly fix that? Or even identify that it’s a problem? Nothing actually changed or happened, it’s just suggested that you might be taking bribes.

And the more and more our society comes to depend more and more on machine-based suggestions, this tone-deafness will only get worse. Until sentience, of course. And then we’ve got a bigger fish to fry.

We spend a lot of time in our little social media (#SMEM) bubble, talking about how vital it is for government agencies, first and second responders, and the human service industry to be “present” on social media. It’s the future, we say. It’s trendy, your executive says.

And all of that is true. It’s just not the whole story. Nor the why.

You see, there are two reasons that social media is so critical to crisis communications. The first “why” is because that’s where the audience is. Study (Neilsen, 2011) after study (Pew, 2011) after study (American Red Cross, 2011) has shown that Americans use social media as a big part of their lives. And that big part, it just keeps getting bigger. I’ve yet to see a study that has demonstrated a decrease in either the percentage of people on social networks, or time spent on social media sites. You can yell as loud as you want, but if you’re talking to your publics, they’re probably not going to hear you.

The other “why” is mobility. It’s easy to get updates via social media when you’re not at a computer. Like y'know, when you’re in the middle of a crisis or disaster. Whether it’s using dedicated smartphone apps (e.g., Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, etc.) or tools like Twitter FastFollow, people can utilize their phone (which everyone has these days) to get more information. Proof? From the Nielsen study:

Nearly 40% of social media users access social media content from their mobile phone

Internet users over the age of 55 are driving the growth of social networking through the Mobile Internet

From a 2010 Pew survey on mobile use:

Compared with 2009, cell phone owners ages 30-49 are significantly more likely to use their mobile device to send text messages, access the internet, take pictures, record videos, use email or instant messaging, and play music

In total, 64% of African-Americans access the internet from a laptop or mobile phone, a seven-point increase from the 57% who did so at a similar point in 2009.

But that’s not the whole story. Sure social media is great, but it (say it with me) is just one tool in the toolbox. You still have to have a place for press conferences and letterhead for releases and a website. Hey, your website! Since we’ve already established the social media users are using mobile means of accessing social media, why not head over to our local government website on our phones and check out… Oh, yeah it doesn’t really fit. And the pictures and animation are all missing. The drop-down menus screw everything up…

Someone needs help building a mobile website. And fast.

The Sensei Marketing blog posits these things to more fully utilize mobile websites:

• Create a mobile status page for your company’s live crisis updates
• Allow it to localize the updates by zip/postal code
• Add to the ability to text updates to customers automatically
• Integrate the service with field teams so that when they roll into an area, customers know
• Hook it into your social accounts so overly concerned customers can communicate with someone
• Let them share it with others easily; enable your customers to help you manage the crisis and disseminate official news and updates.

Do you have any other tips for building a mobile website, especially as it relates to crisis response and communication?

One more thing, just because in between writing this post and posting it, I heard from one of my social media heroes, Andrew Wilson who was casting about for ideas on the future of the communication team. One of his most immediate suggestions was for the inclusion of mobile technologies specialists on the team. Great minds and all that. =)