One of most well written and intriguing books I’ve read in a long time is Brain Rules by John Medina. I just happened to pick it up a little book store while exploring one of our little coastal towns in the Pacific Northwest and was pleased to see that the author is affiliated with Seattle Pacific University–my alma mater and also where I taught for a year.I’m very pleased to see it is now on the New York Times bestseller list.

The reason this book applies to crisis managers is because of the many insights into how our brains work. The applications are too many to list here but a few highlights that stuck with me.

1) Responders need exercise and rest. May sound obvious but when you look at the steep decline in rational thinking and productivity when people get stretched beyond their endurance you will make certain your crisis plans include plenty of qualified backup staff.

2) Messaging. When people are under a lot of stress (such as fearful in a hurricane, tornado or pandemic) they process information differently. Dr. Vincent Covello has been preaching this for a long time and has come up with some simple and powerful messaging formulas that should be applied by all crisis and emergency communicators. Medina provides the scientific rationale for Dr. Covello’s practices.

3) Vision trumps all. When you read (or watch the videos online that illustrate the rules)  this you will wonder why we are (and I am right now) so hooked on communicating by putting these funny visual symbols on paper or on your computer screen. We all need to think more how we can communicate our key messages through video and images. Video particularly when you read about how the brain deals with motion vs images.

4) Gender. I got to admit, the author was pretty fearful about going into this realm, and I think took political correctness a bit too far. But the example he provided of what happens when you don’t gave him room for some of the waffling. Point is, men and women’s brains are very different. Maybe women’s are quite superior as seems to be suggested here, but they are different. I don’t think the clear differences are adequately reflected in much of what and how we try to communicate.

I hope you pick up a copy of this or at least visit the website. His site and his writing approach themselves provide great models as you seem him very clearly implementing the lessons he has learned from his years of research.

By the way, since paid blogging is getting to be such an issue, no, I have not been contacted by the author or publisher. I certainly would tell you if I was.

I’ve long suggested and provided a few solid examples of where major stories originate on blogs and then migrate to mainstream media. The Dan Rather gaffe on President Bush’s military record was one noteworthy example. I think conventional wisdom, certainly in my case, has it that blogs come first, then mainstream. Afterall, they often are plugged in, are done by one person rather than a staff, don’t have editorial layers, and don’t have accountability to worry about.

Turns out I may be quite wrong. At least according to this item from Slashdot that references a NYT article. The very process at work here probably explains their research findings however. MSM to blog – to other blog – to many more blogs. Sot it looks like it is following based on the volume of references. But where did the story start? In this case, probably MSM because that’s where the findings might be released. I don’t know. Kind of skeptical here.

Thanks to the ever vigilant, hyperactive social media guru Shel Holtz and his Twitter feed, I’m sharing Walmart’s “Twitter External Discussion” policy statement. Looks like a good one and a useful model to follow.

Here’s a little ditty about reputation wars conducted on the internet–in the key of F.

Seems United baggage handlers smashed musician Dave Carroll’s guitar and then didn’t manage the situation very well. What happened next reminds me of many years ago when I was working in a hospital outside of Chicago as a surgical orderly. I remember one day when a well-known trial attorney came in for surgery. Man oh man, were those docs and hospital staff nervous. I came to the conclusion that if you want really, really attentive medical care, you should be a trial lawyer–plaintiff’s attorney obviously.

Notice to airlines–treat songwriters nicely. Don’t smash their guitars and then leave them singing the blues. Because they might just write a song about you, post it on YouTube and turn it into an overnight hit (at this writing over 500,000 views! and climbing)–with your bad name all over it. Something tells me Mr. Carroll will be getting a very nice new guitar courtesy of his new favorite airline.

The US Coast Guard has earned a well deserved reputation for public information management, and now this includes leadership in the use of social media. This has been led by the Commandant himself and eagerly embraced by many in the Public Affairs community. We’ve been fortunate to feature some of these CG leaders on our Strategy Forum webinars.

But, the use of social media by agencies such as the US Coast Guard raises a number of interesting issues. This blog by Coastie Ryan Erickson goes into some detail in examining some of these challenges, as well as posing some potential solutions. The primary challenge he poses is the need to not only use outlets such as Twitter and Facebook to push info out, but also as listening devices. But how is this to be handled? And what happens if they really start to be used in this way and Tweeters (Twitterers?) use Twitter to call for help? It’s not a hypothetical question apparently.

What if in this hurricane season there are a number of victims stranded and the only way of communicating about their need for assistance is through Twitter? We do believe that use of text messaging for this kind of two way notification, calls for help, status confirmation is very important. It’s why we’ve added text-to-inquiries capabilities in version 6.2 of PIER.

Every public agency charged with public safety is going to have to come to grips with the challenge identified by the Coast Guard. Our means of communication are changing–and that includes calls for help. The issue of legal liability will quickly emerge. I suspect that the typical response of many in emergency management of, “Uhhh, what’s Twitter?” will not be an acceptable defense.

OK, I’m a very proud dad–proud of all three of my grown children. But today is a special day with the Timesonline featuring an interview of my daughter Ashley Rodriguez talking about her now famous food blog Not Without Salt.

I’d like to think she got some of her interest in and writing abilities from me, but she has far surpassed me in that area now. I do know for certain that she got her talent and passion for food and beauty from my beautiful and talented wife.

Congrats, Ash! Keep it up!

What if you could get inside access to one of the nation’s most influential journalists? Lots of clients pay big PR agents and firms lots of money, lots and lots of money, for the purpose of getting greater access to top-level journalists. But what if newspapers or news outlets in their business crisis decided to just skip the whole PR agency thing and charge for access?

I’m not saying that is what is going on at the Washington Post, but the “salon” event at the home of the publisher is starting to walk, talk and quack like a duck.

This is interesting from several perspectives. For one thing, it is a major–I mean major–reputation crisis for the Washington Post. And since most reputation crises involve how to deal with media reporting around the crisis, it is also doubly fascinating to watch news organization manage media crises. The apologies are streaming forthwith, as are the “that’s not what we meant at all” and “someone inside really screwed up.” Fine. I’ll accept that. A marketing person did what was expected of them and sold the event based on benefits to those who would pay $250,000 to participate in this very special meeting. Since journalists from the Washington Post would be there, would it be too much to say that this would give those attending some kind of inside access? I think not. But whoa, what  does that mean? Now you have to buy a good story? And what it does it mean for the readers?

Reminds me of a good size public crisis I was involved in a number of years ago regarding a forestry project on the southern tip of South America, in Tierra del Fuego. Environmental activists were getting up in arms about the potential large scale forestry project. A very negative and very incorrect article appeared in the newspaper in Ushuaia. The employees from the company I was working with were in Ushuaia and met with the newspaper. They offered a substantial sum of money to buy advertising in the paper to get their story out. The editor or publisher asked them if they would like their story in advertising form or in news form. They asked me what they should take and I said news form, of course.

But if you can buy the news, what does it mean for the readers? Are we getting to this level of journalistic integrity. The no, no, no’s we hear from the publisher certainly suggest the concern she has that people might interpret it that way. She is very right to be concerned about public perception around this.

I think it is a very good thing this little problem has erupted. It will make everyone a lot more sensitive to the very real temptation to allow journalism to be tainted with corruption in the business crisis they are in. Maybe it will help protect the integrity for just a bit longer.

One question that ought to be always on the minds of crisis managers is how much traffic can your website take? As it becomes more clear the critical role that the internet plays in emergency public information (such as Hurricane Ike), understanding the traffic limits on the internet is of great importance to emergency response planners. So, how much can it take and how can we know?

The Michael Jackson death will serve as a benchmark for some time to come, as 9/11 did for some time after that event. According to the article in the July 6 NYT, traffic on news websites at around 6 pm (ET) hit around 4.2 million per minute. Yes, per minute. If that traffic were sustained, that would be 250 million hits per hour. I was conducting training with a group of PIER users at our offices in Bellingham and when the first hint came out (someone was checking email during training of course) immediately everyone hit TMZ and whatever news sites we could find. It was fascinating for this group of senior communication managers to watch the events unfold (Twitter Breaking News On beat the LA Times by half an hour with the news of his death). But we were a roomful of people crowding the news sites with our smart phones and laptops.

The impact of this kind of traffic was substantial. Wikipedia broke the record for visits to a single article in a one hour period (one million, plus the quarter million who went to the misspelled entry “Micheal Jackson.”

AIM went down for 40 minutes according to the NYT article and a number of sites experienced significant slowing. Some search terms on Google News were significantly slowed.

This kind of internet traffic reminds me a little of a greeting card I saw this weekend while strolling the streets of Anacortes, Washington. It had a picture of a cruise ship on its side with the caption something like: “The captain knew it was a mistake when the cruise director announced a sighting of Elvis Presley off the starboard side.” What will it take to capsize the ship of the internet. The overall message is, it will take a lot. The resilience of the internet as a communications channel is truly remarkable owing ultimately to its fundamental design as a spider web of connections. Still, it has its limits. Almost every site has its limits, every application, every web service. Knowing those limits, preparing to deal with them–even while building capacity needs to be the concern of everyone in crisis communication or emergency response planning. While some may think the passing of a pop star is the biggest, most important thing to ever happen, I can think of a few more items that could bring even this resilient means of communication to its knees.

Jenavi Kasper has no fear of being hired by me. Not after what she did to a Phoenix advertising agency who offered her an unpaid internship. For their trouble (and it can be a lot of trouble) they got slammed hard in a blog post.

I’ve had a number of interns in my years of owning a marketing and PR firm–many have been excellent and some of my best employees started as interns. Some have been ridiculous–like Jenavi who seem to think that four years of college makes them an instant expert and who have no idea that the work of an ad agency includes reading numbers off a spreadsheet. No doubt there were menial tasks to be done and these quite naturally fall to the intern. Does she think the lead Account Manager who is bringing in the billings ought to be doing basic office organizations tasks instead of her exalted self?

But her naivete and arrogance are not why I would not hire her, well, not the main reason. Anyone who would bite so hard the hand that feeds them deserves to find that there are no more hands offering food. Her naivete is not so much in failing to understand the role of an intern and missing out on the opportunities she had to learn some things there, her real naivete is in understanding how damaging her nastiness will be to her in future hiring. If I was her I’d try to get that blog post gone as soon as possible, because any future employer is going to Google her and find out about this. Even if the post is gone now, they might come across this (and I’m guessing a few more like it) and maybe think twice. I’m not trying to harm her employment chances in any way, but I hope this gets passed to a few marketing or PR students signing up for internships and I hope they learn from this and not repeat her mistake.

More important for crisisblogger readers is this as another example of the risks of employees and interns and social media. If Jenavi’s naivete wasn’t so obvious, a vicious message from an unhappy intern could blossom into a major reputation issue. Hopefully, if you get attacked by an employee or intern, they will hurt themselves more than you as Jenavi did.

I’ve got a few friends who keep sending these jokes and internet messages–you know, the kind that say send this to five gazillion of your friends or something really bad will happen to you. Very often the messages include urban legends–like the one I got the other day about cell phones causing popcorn to pop. Very convincing. Had links to videos showing these people putting three or four cell phones aimed at a few kernels of popcorn. They made the phones ring and wait, wait, yes! the corn started popping. Of course, the comments on the email trail sounded very concerned–if this is the kind of radiation these things put out, no wonder people are dying of brain tumors from cell phones!

Well, I went to snopes to check it out and sure enough, along with the legend of cell phone cooking eggs, there was the legend of popcorn. False. Snopes is a wonderful thing. I advised my friend who sent this to me, as I have advised several others, before passing these things on it is good to check them with snopes. Saves some real embarrassment.

What does this have to do with the JIC?

I’m up to my eyeballs in writing EPIA (Emergency Public Information Annex) including detailed JIC plans. If anybody believes in the JIC and its value I do. But I am concluding that as much as we try to put in place the processes that will allow the JIC to put out emergency information to the public very fast, it will never be fast enough in this world. The media and the informed public will ALWAYS go to the most immediate information. That’s exactly why Twitter is so popular right now. Nothing beats the immediacy of someone who just saw a plane crash and is tweeting and twitpicing the image. Even the fastest JIC can’t beat an eyewitness with a text message or a video. So if you can’t beat or even meet the speed of news about an incident, and the mass media and a good part of the public will go to whoever has the most up to date information, will the JIC even survive? As I have said repeatedly recently to clients and in presentations–be fast or be irrelevant. Is the JIC destined to irrelevancy because it can’t match the speed?

I don’t think so. I think the answer is snopes. Crisis communicators and emergency management PIOs (Public Information Officers) have always struggled with the inherent conflicts between speed and accuracy. The conventional wisdom has always been accuracy above all. It make sense because credibility is everything–lose that and the game is up. But the public and media operate on immediacy–speed trumps all (I date this to the 2000 elections and it has only gotten worse since then). Snopes focuses on accuracy. It is THE authoritative source on urban legends. While the inaccuracy of information on the internet is generally known and accepted, sites and services like snopes exist to create some sense of security that the truth can be known. Mainstream media are struggling with this as well and while tilting toward speed, some are thankfully very concerned about maintaining their credibility.

While I think that speed is still terribly important for the JIC, accuracy should trump all. I believe that only completely verified information should be approved and released BUT in the meantime, PIOs should be communicating what is known at that time. Rumor management becomes one of the most important–and may eventually become the primary–tasks of the JIC. Because when a major incident is happening it is completely certain now that a lot of people (citizen journalists if you will) will be providing immediate information. Some of it true, some of it false. The media and the public need someplace to go to verify the facts. They need, in effect, a snopes for the response. Someplace to separate rumor from truth. Those inside the response should have access to the most relevant facts about the event and the response. That is the job of the Situation Unit.

But the process of identifying rumors, checking facts, verifying the information to be released and then getting timely approval for the release of it is critically important. Evenif the JIC is not first with the information, if there is too much a time delay between the initial faulty or unverified reports and verified information, the JIC will still quickly become irrelevant.

Speed and accuracy–still the drivers. But the dynamics of social media are definitely changing the rules of the game and how it is played.