Too much info during incidents: time for a new command position?

As Hurricane Sandy (#sandy or #frankenstorm on Twitter) approaches the East Coast, we are once again witnesses to a great volume of information and warnings put out by a whole slew of sources. Governments (federal, state, municipal), the media, volunteer technical communities (VTCs). Virtual Operations Support Teams (VOSTs), the private sector, bloggers and ordinary citizens.

Even though we are still just anticipating the storm, some serious efforts are being deployed, particularly in crisis mapping: Tweak the Tweet, ESRI, Google Crisis Response and others, are using this tool to gather info. Anyone can see how easy info overload can happen.

Now, go forward in time, let's say 24 hours, and all those channels, at the local, state and even federal level, are totally jammed with requests for assistance, witness accounts of the evolving situation, and comments on how the response is being handled. It all becomes a big noise ...

Information should be the most valuable commodity for an incident commander or an EOC director. If we adopt the view of "whole of community" approach to preparedness and resilience. we should also aim for "community-based situational awareness" or a fully comprehensive user-defined operating picture.That means integrating intelligence from social listening activities.

That's where the value of SMEM (social media in emergency management) really comes to the fore. The social convergence (mobile tech + social networks) results, on one hand, in empowered volunteers (organized or spontaneous), and in greater scrutiny and even criticism, on the other hand.

All this results in a veritable flood of information that could have an impact on any incident response, from ops to the PIO function. So, I'm thinking the time has come to modify the ICS/NIMS structure and add a formal intelligence officer position as part of the command staff. I've talked before about the need to make a similar change in terms of providing emergency information. 

I know making change to the doctrine is not a popular topic but times change, how people consume and produce information has changed as well. I also know that span of control issues could arise by adding another command position (if you add the general staff and command staff chiefs/positions ...).

But the environment of any incident has changed because of social networks. Information is available in real-time and should be added to the decision making process. Now, I'm not talking about an Intel Officer position in the sense of criminal intel (for my law enforcement friends who might be troubled by access to this kind of info) or in the normal military sense. This concept of an incident intelligence officer is more in the contextual analysis and environment that surrounds every disaster or crisis.

It's more akin to an information manager role, controller of all the data that's available to command. The photographer/developer who puts all the available operating pictures into a useful mosaic of ops pictures ... to come up with a "global view" of the incident.

I see the benefits as follows:

1. better, more comprehensive, community-based situational awareness for command
2. supports better decisions by giving more info for the allocation of strategic resources in tough fiscal environments
3. makes reporting up to higher echelons (political or otherwise) easier with a more "constituency-oriented" picture of what the incidents means ...

I'm sure this will get a lot of comments ....looking forward to them! 

Big exercise = big lessons learned in SMEM

I had the opportunity this week to take part (mostly as observer/coach) in a big emergency management exercise. Trillium Resolve had more than 1,000 participants from 50+ organizations in a vast part of southwestern Ontario.

The scenario was based on a series of severe weather events impacting municipalities in four different counties and the largest nuclear power station in the world (with 8 reactors ...).

A scenario this ambitious proved to be too enticing for not trying to add on a social media component. As part of the design team, I promoted early on, a "closed loop" approach. This was done mainly to ensure that no exercise tweet or Facebook post would cause concerns.

The way I thought we could do this without overburdening the exercise players, was to simulate the "output" of a social media listening operation. Based on the "tweak the tweet" syntax, I developed a series of report such as this one. Whenever possible or relevant, I added geo-location data and pictures or videos to add to the realism. 

The original intent was to have the reports send via email to different EOCs and PIOs playing. What actually happened was that the exercise controllers, broke down the reports and included individual simulated posts/tweets on a fake news web site that had been created for the exercise. So it ended up that players, especially PIOs/comms people, actually had to monitor social media and web/media stories in real time. 

Now, if we had had the time and resources, we could have used a tool such as Simulation Deck which is rapidly growing popular among the military, academic and corporate sectors, as a tool to test social media monitoring capabilities.

By trying to inject some contemporary reality into the exercise play, we were trying to do four things in relations to monitoring social networks:

1. develop our ability to keep up with the volume of data we needed to keep an eye on (social and traditional media)
2. increase our ability to identify social network injects which posed reputational threats or we calls for info or help
3. determine what data could be analysed and transformed into solid intel for decision-making purposes and putting in place the channels to flow that info
4. finally, validate the process for engagement/responses

Since I wasn't playing, I wanted to test my own skills ... so I started a crowdmap of not only the play injects but also the real-life media stories and posts about the exercise ... It was hard to keep up. I've written before that social media monitoring can be quite challenging and requires a team effort.

So, in closing, some key lessons I learned (or learned again !) during the week. To be effective, a social media listening/monitoring program needs the right resources ... it's a big job! You need (in my estimation):

• to do the basic listening and searches, 
• to tag/analyse/collate/curate the info and make it into actionable intel or tasks 
• to conduct the engagement piece and respond to calls for help, request for info or dispel rumours.

It's more than one person could do ... or even three. Also, another key piece is to put in place, ahead of time, the channels through which the output of your social listening program will flow.

And very importantly, find a "champion" in your organization's leadership, who believes in the validity of the info that results and acts upon it ... proving that social media monitoring is now an essential part of any response to a disaster or crisis.

Crisis communications readiness: a necessity

I often say that every organization should have a thorough crisis communications plan and that every response plan should have a crisis comms component. Furthermore, every employee should receive some sort of media relations/public outreach awareness training because they can all become the "face" of the organization during a crisis.

in addition, social convergence (mobile tech + social networks) means that someone is always watching you ... or at least has the mean to tape (videotape too) what you're doing ... catch their actions for posterity.

There is no way to avoid crises ... people make mistakes, have lapses of judgment ... and they get caught on tape or called out online.

Nothing goes unseen today ...well not much ... the most fleeting, embarrassing moment can come back to haunt you. This briefest of movement of one finger, caused a fire chief to publicly apologize. 

Now, when you do something dumb in a deliberate manner, in front of cameras ... then you're asking for trouble:

Okay ... that's once right ? People learn from their mistakes ... don't do something stupid like that again ? ... Well, it would seem not in every case ... read this account of a second troubling incident involving the now infamous "badge 728.

You know you're really in trouble when your boss has to apologize on your behalf and behalf of the whole organization:

Online mistakes can equally be as painful: 

That particular tweet prompted this apology:

StubHub

• ✔

@StubHub

We've deleted an unauthorized tweet made from this Twitter handle. We apologize to all of our followers for the inappropriate language used.

A fantastic top 20 list of online/social media mistakes can be found here.

A few of lessons here:

• dust off your crisis comms plan and exercise regularly
• train your people and then train them again 
• bring awareness of the social convergence and the challenges it brings to anyone who interacts with the public

Your people are human ... they will make mistakes ... the best way to counter them is to adopt a human approach. 

It worked well for the American Red Cross.

Some other good examples of how to handle mistakes or crisis on social media. We're in a brand new connected world ...we're all watching ...waiting for the next person to falter publicly ... 

It's time for emergency managers to catch up with society!

The Canadian Red Cross did all of us who believe in the growing importance of social media in emergency management (SMEM) a great favour. They commissioned a poll whose results indicate that Canadians expect us to use the tools they use every day during disasters.

The following infographic tells the story:

• 64 per cent of Canadians use social media sites, 62 per cent of whom participate nearly every day
• 63 per cent think disaster and emergency response agencies, including fire and police, should be prepared to respond to calls for help that are posted on social media networks
• About one third of respondents (35 per cent) think emergency services would respond to a request for help posted on social media, 74 per cent of whom believe help would arrive within one hour
• 54 per cent of Canadians say they would use social media to let loved ones know they are safe in an emergency
• Although television (39 per cent) and radio (26 per cent) are the preferred ways of receiving news about an emergency, one third (31 per cent) of Canadians say they would prefer various electronic methods, such as web sites, social media or cell phones
• While the majority of Canadians say they have personally experienced disasters, 66 per cent have not taken steps to prepare themselves for an emergency
• The main reasons cited for not taking steps to prepare include: perception that a disaster is unlikely to occur in their area (27 per cent); never thought about it (21 per cent); and no time/never got around to it (12 per cent)

The interesting is to marry these results with these ones on mobile usage:

This social convergence (mobile tech + social networks) is the basis for a new era in emergency management and while there are many enthusiastic practitioners of SMEM in Canada, there is a great deal of room for acceptance by EM officials.

During my stay in Halifax last week, for the Canadian Red Cross Conference on Disaster Management, I heard lots of enthusiastic comments but those were not generally associated with ongoing SMEM practices.

Many recognize the value of social networks as emergency information tools ... as a one-way for EM agencies to communicate with their audiences during a disaster, few yet fully realize the great "force-multiplying" effect of the use of social media by citizens during disasters.

Simply put, they ignore the valuable data that people put out voluntarily to share their experiences in their neighbourhoods, streets and communities during incidents. All data, that can be monitored on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Reddit for example, and then analyze to provide actionable intelligence to support effective decision-making by command.

My argument to spur on adoption of full spectrum SMEM practices: there is no greater commodity for an EOC manager or incident commander than information or intelligence. Social media monitoring brings tons of such intel ... actionable information that can lead to better decisions and a more efficient use of strategic resources during a response ... that's a key point in a fiscal environment where resources are becoming scarcer. 

In the end, emergency managers won't have a choice ... they'll either make full use of the tools that the people they serve use everyday ... or they run the risk of being irrelevant or lack the full array of intelligence that leads to better responses.

Building community resilience and social networks

I had the great privilege to be invited to present at the Canadian Red Cross Conference on Disaster Manager in Halifax earlier this week. The theme of the conference was "community resilience" and I was asked to talk about the use of social media in emergency management (SMEM).

We heard from Laurie Pearce of Royal Roads University on the need to build resilience from the bottom up, based on the capabilities and strengths of communities. Karina Pillay-Kinnee, the Mayor of Slave Lake in Alberta, told the immensely powerful story of how her town was nearly destroyed by a wildfire and how community resiliency provided the backbone of its ongoing recovery.

Also very illuminating was a first-hand account of the Japan Triple Disaster from  Naoki Kokawa of the Japanese Red Cross.

I tried to orient my talk on the notion of social media as a key element in all components/pillars of emergency management and the EOC. In my mind, this certainly goes way beyond using SM as communications tools although they are very powerful instruments in connecting with audiences during a disaster. Information is aid ... social networks play a great role in delivering it.

I believe that the true power of SMEM resides in the increase of information and data available to decision-makers. It allows them to deploy resources is a much more strategic manner because their situational awareness can be in real-time, down to the hyper-local level with the use of the right technologies. We all have to gain by a full integration of SM into EM.

I cannot think of a better way to increase our collective resilience.

New technologies and the power of the few

This week, the world witnessed the other side of the "Arab Spring" ... Hardliners, from Tunis to San'a, from Benghazi to Cairo, exploited the sheer stupidity of a misguided and hateful petty crook in California, turned "film maker".

The "Innocence of Islam" episode shows the power now at the disposal of almost anyone, to do some very good stuff ...or in this case, some serious damage. All it took, is 14 minutes of preview, shared on Youtube ... re-shared on other social networks ... to spark anti-US sentiments across the whole Mideast. 

It shows how U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century is at risk of being derailed by a single, pseudonymous fraudster. In the 1990s, Marine Gen. Charles Krulak famously coined the phrase “The Strategic Corporal” to describe how a 19-year old Leatherneck’s actions, broadcast worldwide, could derail U.S. interests. Meet Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the Strategic Con Man.

The article on Wired.com illustrates the evolution of the "strategic corporal" concept in the age of social media. Now, almost anyone, or anything, can come up suddenly and threaten an organization's reputation or very existence. In some extreme cases, the very lives of its members might be in jeopardy.

My good friend Gerald Baron has already written about crises that go "viral".  His main point is being prepared. I'd venture to say that any measures taken to reach that degree of preparation should include: 

• Basic, daily social media listening or business intel gathering 
• a process put in place to action any intel that merits a reaction
• delegation of authority to put in motion your response
• identifying and using the right channels to reach your key stakeholders 
• training every member of your organization in basic media relations and crisis management ... just enough so they know how to refer calls/queries ...

A few caveats. Despite the best plans and preparation, sometimes you just can't win. In this case, anti-US feelings run deep in large segments of the Middle East. All the speeches and calls for calm by President Obama and Secretary Clinton might be for naught.

Also, decentralizing or not having tight control over your crisis communications response might itself lead to more issues ... a quick social media counter-attack could also put your on dangerous grounds:

The State Department has come under criticism in the past for being slow to adapt to the social-media world. It didn’t have that problem in Cairo: Its Twitter and Facebook engagement was rapid and consistent. But that rapidity may have outraced its more traditional diplomatic responsibilities to insist on the inviolability of its Embassy and to stick up for basic American values — even when the speech in question is gross.

You can't respond at a tactical level by undermining your strategic posture. That's the conclusion of the Wired.com article where the above quote came from.

In the end, vigilance and preparation are the only tools at your disposal to see you through a crisis gone viral ... and some gumption to stick with your plans and by your principles ...When social media is used for nefarious purposes, they can become deadly weapons in the hands of those who wish you harm.

.social media, crowdsourced news and your crisis comms posture

Today's shooting in the heart of New York City brought, once again, a perfect illustration of the changing landscape in how news are reported. More than ever, social media drives the "show".
In fact, news break on social media, legacy media pick it up ... add some elements (if they have any) and analysis (sometimes). That's the reality ...see link below ...

#ESB: On Social Media, Witnesses Describe Scene of Chaos

We had an interesting on what this means for media and emergency management agencies in today's #smemchat (every Friday at 12:30 pm eastern) .... Here's a tweet this discussion generated:

@saraestescohen Media relies on sensational, disturbing stories/pics 2 get attention. Attention is the currency @patricecloutier #smemchatOrg9  14:13web

The simple truth is that legacy media is now in direct competition with social media. They need to move fast to stay relevant and that means that the traditional media ethics are being put to the test. Editors have choices to make ... tough ones such as the ones made today.

Here's how it goes: a passer by uploads (gruesome) pictures of what he's just witnessed to a social network ... they go viral ... many media outlets run them (or others ...as graphic in many cases) ...some don't ...deciding they're not in the public interest. You be the judge:


More on the journalistic debate about crowdsourced pictures ... and the New York Times' decision to run pretty graphic picture(s). 

• How news websites handled the issue 
• The New York Times' decision to run pretty graphic picture(s)

So, some general observations/questions:

• who's your primary audience in your crisis comms plan? the traditional media or all those who now get "plugged in" via the web and social networks? Do you really need to go through the media to get your message out when others are already talking about you on social networks? 
• do you conduct routine social listening (or monitoring) to quickly pick out reputational threat and for operational purposes? When things happen, they can have direct and indirect effects on your activities ... knowledge is power ... intelligence allows for informed decisions in a crisis.
• The lines between social media and traditional media will continue to blur as "crowdsourcing" news gathering will expand even more ... news will move at the speed of social networks ...will you ?
• Do you have the procedures and delegation of authority in place to respond within minutes when incidents happen or reputational threats are discovered? 
• Do you have your own ethical guidelines or policies in terms of what you can post, retweet or link to from your own accounts and website? If you do, are you prepared for the inevitable mistakes and infringements on those policies that are bound to happen?

These are just quick thoughts that came to mind today. I continue to be amazed by the pace of changes brought by the impact of mobile technologies and social networks. Stay tuned ...I'm sure we'll have plenty more fodder for comments in the very near future.

Aurora shooting: shows that general situational awareness is an everyday must

The terrible movie theatre massacre in Aurora, Co, truly was horrific. Another senseless tragedy, where first responders reacted within a couple a minutes ...stayed calmed and displayed exemplary professionalism in the most extreme situation ... 


So, we saw another drama unfold online and on social networks. While, once again, the story was told online, and particularly on Twitter and Reddit, for a couple of organization, ignorance proved to be very damaging. You would think that by now, organizations would know that social listening (or monitoring) should be a routine matter.


The media sure knows and more and more stories are broken via social network tips and monitoring. 


But two entities, one a powerful US lobby group (the National Rifle Association or NRA), the other one a trendy online retailer, clearly missed the memo about the need to monitor your social environment and the news ... in other words, maintaining general situational awareness as a matter of course.


What did they do? they tweeted out of turn ... made them look totally insensitive, uncaring and positively revolting. The reason? The people tweeting were unaware of the tragedy. While one might say: oh, how could they have known? I posit that the real question is: "How could they NOT have known?" 

Here's the NRA's tweet. At first people thought it might have been a pre-scheduled tweet that went out automatically at a certain time. Turns out, not the case. They simply didn't know. 


Well, is the tweet not only gone, the whole account has disappeared and the NRA has got a full omelet on its face.

The UK-based Celebboutique.com tweeter thought they could capitalize on a trending hashtag on Twitter, without really checking WHY is what so popular.


Hey, if you're that stupid ... you deserve to get slammed ... it's even worse then re-tweeting a tweet without reading it first ...




So, what to do? Well, if you're not monitoring social media, key blogs and general news website on an ongoing basis, you're in danger of making the same mistake. This is not time wasting ... just surfing the net to kill time at work ... No, it's an essential crisis communications activity and business intelligence practice.


That's how i spend the first 30 minutes of my days ... and many more after that, checking intermittently throughout the following hours. 


Here are some thoughts on how to put in a routine monitoring program and how to ramp things up when an incident occurs ... might be worth reading ...

an SMEM reality check

I had the opportunity to be deployed to the site of a structural collapse in Northern Ontario this week to help coordinate emergency information. The outcome was a sad one with to people losing their lives. 


What I want to focus on is the provision of emergency information (EI) and the use of social media in such disasters. You all know I'm a big proponent of crisis communications planning and the use of social networks as EI tools.


This is easy to do from the comfort of my home and office in the Greater Toronto Area ... deployments such as this one though ... bring a needed "reality check" to just how much things have changed on the ground ... in all areas of the province.


Let me be clear here ...What i'm about to discuss is not about Elliot Lake (#elliotlake on Twitter)... or how the collapse of the Algo Centre Mall was handled in terms of communications. These are simply general observations that are important for planning and SMEM considerations:

1. many organizations still consider the traditional media as their primary conduit to inform the public ...
2. many still operate on a 24-hour cycle ... with daily news conferences and/or public briefings ... they don't see a need for constant updates in between daily briefings ...
3. many do not use social media at all to communicate with their audiences 
4. many do not monitor social networks to identify issues and communications needs/gaps that may exist
5. many do not have any crisis communications expertise or training 
6. many smaller communities have no trained Public Information Officers 
7. many organizations still think that disasters are local and are unaware of the role that people far away can have in shaping the public perception of their actions/response
8. and, very importantly, many communities still lack the communications infrastructure (bandwith, mobile access) to make full use of SMEM ... 

I could go on but these observations are fairly important in my mind ... we need to ensure that the reality of today's communications/media universe reaches all corners ... 

That's why climbing down from my ivory tower from time to time is a good thing! 

More on transparency and crisis communications

This is a follow up piece to my recent post on the increasing need for transparency in crisis communications response brought by social convergence.

Now, the New York Times is examining the in-house report of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) who owns/operates the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan. Their coverage is very illustrative of how totally inadequate the Japanese government's and TEPCO's own communications response have been (emphasis/bolding is mine):

Over the last year, new details of the disaster have emerged that build a picture of an organization that ignored or concealed that its reactors might be vulnerable to quakes and tsunamis, used its close links with regulators and nuclear experts to hijack nuclear policy and — since the accident — has worked vigilantly to shut out close scrutiny of the ravaged plant’s condition.

The report comes as the government is pushing to restore public confidence in nuclear energy and restart Japan’s reactor fleet. Critics were skeptical. “The report is too full of excuses,” said Masako Sawai of the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, an anti-nuclear policy group.

“If we don’t get to the bottom of this accident, how can we prevent future ones?” she asked.

If you're trying to learn from your mistakes and change things ... ensuring you have the ability to restore public confidence is key ... even better is ensuring you don't lose it in the first place by lying and not disclosing the information people need to stay safe during a disaster. A couple of excerpts from a NYT article of last August makes clear how this loss of confidence permeates everything after (emphasis/bolding is mine):

Given no guidance from Tokyo, town officials led the residents north, believing that winter winds would be blowing south and carrying away any radioactive emissions. For three nights, while hydrogen explosions at four of the reactors spewed radiation into the air, they stayed in a district called Tsushima where the children played outside and some parents used water from a mountain stream to prepare rice.

The winds, in fact, had been blowing directly toward Tsushima — and town officials would learn two months later that a government computer system designed to predict the spread of radioactive releases had been showing just that.

So we see above that government officials did not share information with local officials putting evacuees in danger. That danger proved considerable (emphasis/bolding is mine):

But the forecasts were left unpublicized by bureaucrats in Tokyo, operating in a culture that sought to avoid responsibility and, above all, criticism. Japan’s political leaders at first did not know about the system and later played down the data, apparently fearful of having to significantly enlarge the evacuation zone — and acknowledge the accident’s severity.

“From the 12th to the 15th we were in a location with one of the highest levels of radiation,” said Tamotsu Baba, the mayor of Namie, which is about five miles from the nuclear plant. He and thousands from Namie now live in temporary housing in another town, Nihonmatsu. “We are extremely worried about internal exposure to radiation.”

The withholding of information, he said, was akin to “murder.”

In the end it's very simple ... when governments, agencies or other organizations, betray the trust of their constituents, stakeholders, and/or clients ...it's gone forever ....No more so when you're dealing with a topic as sensitive and fraught with misinformation and rumours as is nuclear power.

Parents whose children have been exposed through deceit and incompetence to high level of radiation ... and are now experiencing high levels of stress ... will never forgive or forget ... who can blame them?