Lindsey Miller from Regan Communications recently wrote about the effective use of Twitter in the Charlotte and Mesa Fire Departments. It offers good insight into how a Twitter plan can be built that leads to interaction with other forms of social media.
No crisis needed: Fire departments embrace Twitter
By Lindsey Miller
lindseym@ragan.com
Charlotte and Mesa departments tweet events, safety information—as well as emergency information
As the saying goes, a single spark can start a prairie fire. In other words, mix together a few people, some time, and a little spark of information and you’ve got a Twitter fire—or at least a burgeoning social media presence.
Two fire departments, one in Charlotte, N.C., and another in Mesa, Ariz., haven’t fought a lot of prairie fires, but the public information officers know the saying well. They’ve both built promising Twitter followings in a few months and a presence on a host of other sites using only what they had: a few public information officers, some videos and photos, and safety events and fires to discuss.
“People were already on all the different outlets, so why aren’t we out there with them trying to communicate instead of trying to force them into what we were using?” says Marrisa Ramirez-Ramos, public information officer and fire and life safety education specialist. “We were using the City of Mesa Web site, but they weren’t users of that already, so let’s get on Twitter and take advantage of people already out there.”
The most obvious application for fire departments using social media is crisis communications. The Los Angeles Fire Department built its name in the fire department social media world with its 6,000-plus following on Twitter. Among other topics, the department tweets about car accidents, building fires safely, and managing brush fires, for which Southern California has become known.
Charlotte may not have many brush fires to tweet about, but is prone to flooding from tropical storms.
Twitter is “a valuable, practical and useful tool for communicating with the public on areas of flooding, what to avoid, preparations, and other critical crisis actions they can take in the middle of a crisis,” says Mark Basnight, Charlotte Fire Department public information officer.
Crisis or not, these fire departments’ approach to social media might help fuel a social media fire at your organization—after all, it takes only a spark.
Choose a few strategic channels
Mesa Fire Department’s social media presence was born in November of last year after Ramirez-Ramos attended a presentation by L.A. Fire Department’s Brian Humphrey at a conference. It was just her, so she started small and set up a YouTube channel. She had a videographer on staff who made public service announcements.
“We started with that one first, because it felt familiar to us,” Ramirez-Ramos says.
“We had the info ready to go; it was just a matter of uploading it onto YouTube,” she says. “I don’t know why it didn’t hit us sooner that we could hit a larger market and more people could hear our messages if we used something on the World Wide Web.”
In January, after researching and familiarizing herself with social media, she created a Twitter feed and Flickr account. With little advertising except two mentions in a newsletter sent to public school children (100,000 copies), nearly 1,000 people are following the fire department on Twitter.
The goal of Mesa’s social media strategy is to have another channel to tell citizens what the fire department does with their tax dollars besides, of course, putting out fires.
“We want them to know these are services we provide—many are free—and we want them to take advantage of the things the city offers, because they’re the taxpayers,” Ramirez-Ramos says.
In addition to events including immunization clinics and car-seat inspections, she sends out prevention tips. During monsoon season, calls to 911 generally double or triple with people trapped in their cars from flooding. Ramirez-Ramos disseminates tips before that happens, and from there, “hopefully it would be a natural transition, if a disaster were to occur, to look to those sites.”
Still, Ramirez-Ramos says she’s found much of her success on Twitter by connecting with local media, most of which also have Twitter feeds.
With local news agencies cutting back on staff, they’re more inclined to cover a car seat safety event, for instance, after the fact thanks to the information Ramirez-Ramos has at the ready, with photos included.
“If I can get the media to pick up a story because of Twitter, I know it’s reaching a wider audience and could very well boost [event] attendance,” Ramirez-Ramos says. “In addition, I have followers often retweet our event and program promotion, so I would hope that our information would reach their followers and these could be people we wouldn’t otherwise reach.”
What’s next? A blog that caters to mommy bloggers with injury prevention education, she says.
Covering all the options
The Charlotte Fire Department is trying to build a presence beyond the news media and not rely on them for coverage.
“We want to extend our reach as broad as we can and not so much depend on others to get the message out, i.e. the news media,” Basnight says. “I don’t want to create a total dependence on the news media to get our message out … I want to reach people where they are—mobile, PDAs, cell phones.”
It’s a paradigm shift, he says, because the public can now get their information directly from the source. Although Basnight and social media officer Rob Brisley have been using social media since March, their department’s presence is exhaustive: CFD News & Information blog,Delicious, Flickr, FriendFeed, Twitter and YouTube.
The content is similar to Mesa’s—events and safety reminders—though the Twitter feed itself has mostly updates about fires and accidents in the area. It looks much like L.A.’s, probably because Basnight also saw Humphrey speak at a conference and decided to follow his lead. Google Groups is for people who don’t use Twitter already or for when Twitter goes down. The blog, however, is the hub for all of the information for all of the sites.
On Oct. 1, they blogged about how a recent fire (which first appeared on the Twitter feed) was started by a child who was playing with matches. And on Oct. 2, they blogged about National Fire Prevention Week.
“We’re looking at ways to be holistic, for people who don’t want to go to 15 Web sites to get info,” Basnight says. “If we can provide holistic approach, people who want to know what’s going on can come here and we can give them a good bit of that.”
So far, the feed has about 1,350 followers.
Instead of using traditional media, Basnight says Charlotte got its “in” with social media thanks to word of mouth among Charlotte’s social media community.
“The social media community of Charlotte has approached us and started chiming in,” Basnight says. “They’re amazed at what we’ve done on our own and everything we’ve learned on our own through experimenting and trial and error. The social media community of Charlotte is 10,000 strong, so we expect our following to increase.”
The following is good, considering the fire department is serving as the “litmus test” for Charlotte’s involvement in social media as a city.
“The Charlotte government hasn’t bought [into] social media yet; we’re the litmus test, the test run,” Basnight says. “Right now they’re allowing us to explore, but they’re watching and working closely with us.”
Basnight says he and his partner are formulating a plan in which a team of people, rather than just two, would be involved with the Twitter feed. Right now, replies are too much to handle. In a crisis situation, a team could more effectively respond to replies and act as eyes and ears around the community.
“When the need arises, Twitter will become interactive,” Basnight says.
“We want to extend our reach from being 1,000-something firefighters and have several hundred people extend that reach with their eyes and ears. We don’t want communications with us being urgent needs; 911 does that,” Basnight says. “But we want people to try to inform us of something that’s going on.”
Also on The Fire PIO…
- Some Simplistic thoughts on Social Media – December 17, 2010
- 360 Degree Social Media – August 19, 2010
- Twitter in the Snow – January 3, 2011
- Should we use social media as a crisis or emergency unfolds? – November 9, 2010
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