Archive for the ‘web 2.0’ Category

AlertMap: Cutting-Edge Emergency And Disaster Information Tool

08.01.17

If you’re even remotely interested in emergency information, check out AlertMap. This disaster-focused mashup pulls together data from some 600 sources to provide an amazingly valuable service.

The tool, from a Hungarian non-governmental organization, is an exceptional source for up-to-date worldwide disaster information .

AlertMap displays 55 categories of emergencies and disasters from fires, to avian flu, to biological terror attacks. Sources include the U.S. Geological Survey, the World Health Organization, the International Volcano Research Centre, and asteroid information is even provided by NASA.

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Clicking on an icon takes you to more information on the location, severity and status of the incident.

For example, I noticed an "epidemic hazard" shown in Toronto (turns out it was about 8 passengers of an Air Canada flight from Tel Aviv being quarantined recently), I clicked on the icon. This took me to an event summary screen with basic information on the incident and a whole series of tabs with more details.

For example, I was able to see the population within 20km of the incident location (4,612,191), the airports, ports and nuclear power plants within 100km and a Google map of the area.

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Right now, AlertMap is tracking about 50 recent incidents in addition to 13 earthquakes within the last 24 hours and 27 active volcanoes.

You can export much of this information easily. While the Google maps (bizarrely) aren’t embeddable, there are plenty of easily accessible RSS feeds and you can export data to Google Earth. For the less tech-savvy, you can get immediate email alerts of breaking incidents.

This is a topic I’ve become increasingly interested in. Last year I presented on California’s use of web 2.0 in response to the California wildfires, and my new job involves work in this area too.

Have you come across any resources similar to this? What are your favourite emergency information tools?

Posted in: case studies, crisis communications, web 2.0

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Hyperlocal Media Coverage Of California Malibu Fires

07.11.27

While researching my presentation for the recent Talk Is Cheap unconference, I came across a fantastic post by Mark Glazer. Alongside discussing the response of media outlets to the first set of fires, Glazer noted the lack of hyper-local coverage of the fires.

What many people who are evacuated really want is simple information on the condition of their home and neighborhood.

He also quoted Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media, who said:

I suspect it’ll be startups, not news organizations, that figure this out…But this is squarely in the sweet spot for traditional media if they understand their missions.”

Now comes news of more fires in western California, this time around Malibu. These fires were much smaller than the ones in October, but news organizations once again went to town with interactive maps and other new-media coverage.

Related to Glazer’s post, though, Fox News found Gillmor’s "sweet" spot and went hyper-local on its map, pinpointing individual houses that were damaged or destroyed.


View Larger Map

 

Very impressive, but again, where was the state government in this?

Ok, these fires weren’t so big so maybe didn’t warrant coverage on their homepage. Surely there’s something up on their Fire Season site though, right?

Wrong.

The only evidence of any fires on their homepage was a link to a news release in their long list of releases.

(Ok, that page does link (yet again…) to a video (not to a player – to the video file directly) and a ‘photo essay,’ but I’m not impressed.)

Another missed opportunity for the state and another home run by the ‘traditional’ media.

Posted in: crisis communications, media, social media, web 2.0

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Social Media and Crisis Communications: My Talk Is Cheap Presentation

07.11.16

Following-on from my last post, last night I presented a session on the crossover between social media and crisis communications at the Talk Is Cheap unconference.

I spoke in particular about the 2007 California Wildfires and how social media could have been used more effectively (while appropriately) in that situation – in essence a longer, more in-depth discussion of my blog post last month.

Here’s the slide deck I used:

I’ve bookmarked most of my sources at del.icio.us/davefleet/TalkIsCheap.

If you’d like more in-depth information on what I discussed, please feel free to email me at davef <at> davefleet <dot> com or DM me on Twitter.

Posted in: pr, public relations, social media, unconference, web 2.0

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Talk Is Cheap – A Stunning Success

07.11.16

Last night I attended the Talk Is Cheap social media unconference hosted by Gary Schlee and his students at Centennial College in Toronto (I presented too, but more on that in a later post).

In my view, the event was a rousing success. Over 200 people registered (about 25% more than the organizers expected) and most of the 15 sessions were packed. As Gary said to me at the end, the event "went viral" in the last week, and attracted a lot of people.

A couple of highlights for me:

Joseph Thornley - Blogger Relations

Blogger relations is a hot topic right now, so this session was an easy choice for me to attend. As can be expected, Joseph gave a very engaging, well-informed presentation on the topic.

Of particular note – his six tips for blogger relations:

  • Live in multiple channels
  • It’s about relationships, not pitches
  • It’s what the other party wants that counts
  • Be part of the conversation
  • Respect the culture
  • Make it real

Donna Papacosta – Podcasting Inside The Organization

A great presentation from Donna on a use for podcasting that most people wouldn’t think of (she also handed out a cheat sheet which I’m shamelessly using for this write-up!). I have a thousand ideas bouncing around inside my head right now.

Donna suggests using podcasts within your organization, for any of the following:

  • Training and development
  • Leadership messages
  • Conference podcasts
  • Employee news
  • Replacing one-to-many conference calls

Why?

  • Cut through the communications clutter
  • Engage employees
  • Low cost
  • Measurable
  • Portable/time shift-able

At the same time, a few notes of caution:

  • Use natural language; no tight scripts
  • Plan
  • Make friends with your IT folks

She also recommended Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson‘s book How to Do Everything with Podcasting, which I can second – I just finished it and it’s a great read.

My Regrets

I only really have one regret, and that’s not being able to check out more of the great sessions that were put on yesterday. I would have particularly liked to take in:

  • Telling the story through social media: A WWF-Canada Case Study by Tara Wood, WWF-Canada
  • Why students and new practitioners should be wading into the social media pool by Chris Clarke, Sarah de Bruyn and Scott MacDonald
  • Social media with social causes: How corporate communications and PR can leverage trends in social media to build brand equality by Sachin Ghelani, Ogrant
  • Using social media to build an audience and drive demand for a novel before it’s even published by Terry Fallis – The Best Laid Plans (seriously Terry, could you pick a longer title next time please?)
  • Social media monitoring – what are you missing? by Chris Ramsey, Radian6

So to Gary and his students, congratulations on a job well done… but could you perhaps get a few less fantastic presenters next time? Thanks very much :)

Posted in: pr, public relations, social media, unconference, web 2.0

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Using Social Media To Create Social Media Training

07.11.12

Communications training courses on traditional strategies and tactics just don’t cut it any more. The ever-increasing rate of change on the Internet, and its emerging impact on media consumption, means organizations need to seriously consider offering social media training to their employees.

This environment, along with a few well-documented faux-pas by PR practitioners, has had me thinking about this topic a lot recently.

I got to thinking, "What should a social media 101 course offer?" I work with a lot of people who have no knowledge of social media. If I had one day to teach people a few key basics, what would they be?

Then I thought, "Why not use social media to create that program?" So, I’m trying something different here.

I’ve established the Social Media Training Wiki at http://socialtraining.wetpaint.com and given it some basic structure.

I’m throwing out a challenge to the online PR community: As a community, let’s develop a best-practice social media 101 training program.

Let’s create a one-day, scratch-the-surface program that will help employees who are new to this social media thing to find their feet.

Let’s put it out there for the good of the community.

Let’s encourage people to adapt it and adopt it.

Let’s see if we can raise the bar for social media knowledge in our organizations.

Check out the wiki. Participate. Input. Discuss.

A wider understanding of social media benefits us all.

Posted in: blogger relations, blogging, news release, pitching, pr, public relations, smnr, social media, social networks, training, web 2.0

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Wetpaint: Merging Wikis With Discussion Forums

07.11.11

I just discovered Wetpaint – a free wiki-hosting site that fully integrates a discussion forum into every wiki.

This site is very cool – it produces great-looking sites and has already attracted big names like CSI: NY, Food & Wine magazine, fuse.tv and Mythbusters as clients. According to a recent release, Wetpaint currently hosts almost 600,000 wikis.

The company announced last week that discussion forums are now integrated into every page of each wiki. As Techcrunch put it:

Posts can be tagged, the view expanded/contracted, there are email notifications of new messages, and the search feature works well. Any forum thread can also be turned into a wiki with a couple of clicks.

On top of that, all of each site’s posts (from every page) are also pulled together in one central forum, where you can view them by keyword tag.

Alongside the simple, easy-to-use interface and neat discussion forums, Wetpaint has a few other cool features:

  • Facebook Application: Lets users create wikis on their Facebook page
  • OpenID: Users can use their OpenID to sign in to any Wetpaint site
  • Google Analytics: Wetpaint helps users understand how their site is performing by tracking use through Google Analytics.

Ad-free wikis for educators are another nice touch. Wetpaint supports most of its wikis through ads on each site. However, they’ve introduced ad-free sites for teachers to let them use wikis in the classroom.

(One other thing – it looks like Wetpoint has a top-notch support team – a few people noted concerns through the comments on Techcruch’s coverage, and Wetpoint responded to each of them within a couple of hours.)

Why is this useful for marketers? Because it further reduces the barriers to consumer participation. By introducing a user-friendly, attractive interface and multiple ways to get involved, Wetpaint makes it easier to encourage contributions and start conversations.

Posted in: facebook, Google, social media, web 2.0, wikis

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5 Keys To Creating A Cutting-Edge Online Newsroom

07.10.30

What should an online newsroom look like?

I’ve spent a fair bit of time in the last few days researching the current state of online newsrooms. I’ve looked at the private sector and the public sector, both within Canada (federal, provincial and municipal) and internationally.

My conclusion: most organizations aren’t using their newsrooms effectively.

From the 28 newsrooms I examined, most limit their new media functionality to RSS feeds. A few incorporate ‘new media’ elements like video or audio; fewer still include social media features.

What characterizes a leading-edge online newsroom?

What would help a newsroom stand out from the masses?

  1. Built on a blogging platform
    • Allows direct user input via comments
    • Permits trackbacks, to show reactions on other sites
    • Ideally incorporates a regularly-updated organizational blog
  2. Uses categories/tagging to classify content
    • Categorizes content with relevant tags
    • Displays tag cloud or list on the newsroom homepage
    • Identifies relevant articles via those tags
    • Allows news to be viewed by key topics, built-in to the navigation
  3. Makes multimedia content easily available throughout
    • Graphical, photographic, video and audio resources accessible from the homepage
    • Provides relevant multimedia content from each document
  4. Makes content easy to access and share
    • Uses social media tools (Flickr and YouTube are obvious examples)
    • Allows users to bookmark and share content through sites like del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati (leading sites commonly allow sharing via up to 14 sites)
    • Provides RSS feeds for all newsroom areas including key topics
    • Advanced search capabilities
  5. Social media news releases
    • See the template here

I don’t think all of these features are essential. There’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution. However, for a newsroom to truly consider itself a leader I think it should aspire to all five feature sets.

My conclusions largely mirror those of Todd Defren and his colleagues, who launched the social newsroom template back in February.

Who are the leaders?

From the limited sample I examined, three stood out:

Posted in: blogging, pr, public relations, social media, social media newsroom, tagging, web 2.0, youtube

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California Wildfires – Using New Media to Communicate In A Crisis

07.10.23

Immediacy is one of the great things about new media/web 2.0.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the coverage of the devastating wildfires down in California recently.

I’m fully aware that crisis communications must focus on traditional channels – TV, radio, print – in today’s media environment. However, quick and responsive new media tactics provide the ability to communicate directly with citizens that those channels do not.

Allen Stern at CenterNetworks wrote a great post about web 2.0-based coverage of the fires on Monday. His post provides a useful list of the ways some people have used new media to post up-to-the-minute information on the fires.

I’m going to focus on my perspective of how corporations have used this technology to respond.

What The Mainstream Media Is Doing

Here are a few of the best examples of ‘new media’ use from the mainstream media:

What California Is Doing

To my surprise, the state of California has a very useful resource at www.calfires.com (although it seems to be up one second, down the next due to high traffic). However, while the resources are useful, I’m surprised at their lack of uptake of new technologies on the website.

The site does have an interactive map. However, on close inspection it turns out that the map is actually from the KPBS News site mentioned above.

Why didn’t California take the bull by the horns and turn its own site into a communications hub during the crisis? Why not do what the news outlets did and use this technology to provide up-to-the-minute updates?

What California Could Do

In addition to what the state is currently doing, it could :

  • Create its own interactive map with the latest updates from citizens and let news organizations embed that in their sites
  • Let citizens upload their own photos and integrate them into the map
  • Set up a blog and a Twitter feed (and integrate them) to give the latest updates on evacuation orders, all-clears, etc.
  • Create an RSS feed (or feeds) to push updates out to people
  • Aggregate news from mainstream outlets to provide a one-stop newsroom
  • Write clearer news releases
  • Do this all centrally, bump their generic information down or off their state’s homepage and give more space to updates on the fires.

Why?

Because they have the necessary website traffic

Google "California Wildfires." Two of the top five links are government websites.

Heck, we don’t even need to wonder if people are going to the government’s website – their CAL FIRE Incident website crashed under the increased traffic.

The LA Times twitter feed, at time of writing, has 96 followers. The San Diego Union-Tribute Help Blog doesn’t even have subscriber stats on Google Reader.

With the traffic going to government sites, they could push information out much more effectively to many times more people.

Because they have the necessary resources

Newsrooms have limited staff. The government, however, has far more extensive resources. Add in the potential for citizen contributions and you have a powerful tool for emergency information.

Because now is not the time to bury information

In a crisis like this, information should be front and centre. The less searching people have to do, the better.

This also goes for news release-writing. If you’re announcing a new toll-free hotline for donations, don’t bury the phone number in the third paragraph (however, check out how their ‘email/share’ button works – interesting). Put it right at the top.

Because no-one will complain about having to look a little harder for vehicle registration information right now

I’m not a crisis communications expert (although hopefully some of you are and I’d love to hear your comments). However, I do know that when the President declares a state of emergency for your state and 750,000 people flee their homes, your list of "highlights" on your home page should not include:

  • Small business seminars
  • A jobs website
  • A link to a DMV video on YouTube
  • A kids’ website

Sure, these are all valuable initiatives but I really don’t think they need to take up space on the homepage right now. While the crisis is full-blown, the state could dedicate a lot more real estate on its main homepage to providing useful information to its citizens.

——-

California is doing a decent job of providing information online to its population in the midst of a crisis. However, with a bit of innovative thinking, they could do a lot more.

Posted in: blogging, crisis communications, Google, media, social media, Twitter, web 2.0

8Comments

My Social Media Life And Why Walled Gardens Don’t Work

07.10.21

While out running recently, I re-listened to a Six Pixels of Separation podcast during which Heidi Miller talked about the social media overload in her life. I got to thinking about how I feel about social media overload and the implications it has for the tools I use.

I first dipped my toe into creating content on the web back in 2000 when I managed the website of a division of Hitachi Europe Ltd. I’ve maintained my own personal website since then, but I’ve only recently launched myself headlong into social media.

I can’t believe how much my life has changed since then.

I plotted a timeline of my adoption of web 2.0 tools this year. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s sufficient to make my point:

This isn’t a linear chart; if anything, the increase is exponential:

One look at my average day shows the central role that social media plays in my life:

I love this new lifestyle. I’m always connected. Nothing I do happens in a vacuum any more. I’ve met a tonne of new people. What’s more, my lifestyle accomodates my new-found passion, so I don’t have to sacrifice anything except time to accomplish all of this.

There’s just one cloud on the horizon – the chart above.

The line can’t keep going up. There isn’t enough time in the day.

I see three options:

  • Option #1: Burn-out
  • Option #2: Level-off
  • Option #3: Aggregate

Option #1: I can continue to use more tools and burn out (no thanks).

Option #2: I can stop using new tools, or I can keep using new ones and let a few less valuable ones drop off. I can see this happening, but it would be more through necessity than choice.

Option #3 Find ways to keep up with multiple tools through one interface. I like this option. A lot.

I already have a few tools to do this:

Twitku is a great tool that lets me watch and update my Twitter and Jaiku feeds at the same time.

Google Reader lets me keep tabs a bunch of sites. As a result, I only need to check sites like Technorati or Facebook occasionally.

iGoogle lets me watch Twitter, Gmail, Google Reader and GTalk while accessing my Google Notebook, TinyURL and Google Docs… all from one page. Vista’s sidebar does a similar job, although with less gadgets available for now.

What ties all these applications together? Information sharing.

In a world of information overload, walled gardens don’t work.

In the future, tools will only fit into my toolkit if they’re opened-up. I need to aggregate their information through other tools. RSS feeds, open APIs and widgets are essential.

I’m not arrogant enough to believe I’m the only one thinking this way.

Companies need to share information through these tools or risk falling into obscurity.

Posted in: blogging, facebook, Google, podcast, social media, social networks, Twitter, web 2.0

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Information R/evolution

07.10.19

Check out this amazing video on how the Internet is forcing us to adapt the way we organize, find and indeed think about information.

I don’t like to gush about things, but this is cool. What’s more, it’s true.

Hat tip: Ed Lee from Blogging Me Blogging You. Thanks Ed.

Posted in: search, social media, tagging, web 2.0

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