A few years back I had the opportunity to visit and tour the Microsoft House of the Future on their campus in Seattle. The house, which looks like the interior of a real house, thrusts you 20 years into the future to show you how Microsoft products in R&D will help enhance our lives. One of the recurring themes during the visit was how “smart phones” would become the virtual nerve center of our daily life. The phones would open our front door, scan merchandise in stores, act as the remote to our electronics and do all the functions of our PC’s. Sort of like the famous Honeymooners episode where Ralph is the Chef of the Future selling one kitchen gadget that does the work of many.
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I want to thank Barry Nuss who is the Fire Marshal and Public Information Officer for the Lincoln County Fire Protection District 1 in Troy, Missouri, for requesting I reach out to fellow PIO’s and PAO’s to find out what they carry in their “go bags” for large scale incidents.
I’m interested to see what you guys travel to incidents with. I am in the position of being both a PIO and Class A firefighter. I have to be prepared on numerous fronts to have “go to” equipment in a number of places.
Just when you think you are getting a good handle on social media and how to apply it to your PIO or PAO protocols some new toy comes along to potentially add to the mix.
If Twitters 140 characters aren’t enough room for all the insightful things you have to say, then maybe you’re ready for Tumblr.
As of this writing the 14th miner has been rescued from the Copiapo, Chile cooper and gold mine. I like many, especially those of us in the emergency services, were up all night watching the human drama that was unfolding before our eyes. I was riveted to the raw internet feed from CNN. To this point it has been a flawless rescue effort.
I am duly impressed by the skill and professionalism of the entire rescue team. From those at the mine shaft opening to the rescue workers who went down to supervise the efforts in the mine to the EMT’s and medical staff and mine and government administrators, everything has been done in an organized and flawless manner.
I’m pretty lucky in Smithtown, NY where I serve as the FD PIO. Most of our day to day press initiatives are covered by the local media which consists of three weekly newspapers and two or three websites which maintain hyper local sites.
If I have a specific alarm report that I want to disseminate to the press, I send a release with photos and let the editors do their thing. In almost all instances the locals do a great job of rewriting the story to fit their papers styles. I always try to place a quote or two in the body of my release but if an editor calls for more information or quotes, I’m happy to provide.
My problem lies with one of the weeklies in that they take my releases verbatim. When I write a release I write it in “fire-ese.” I tell the facts, give the numbers of the apparatus, give hours in military time etc. I use parenthesis around the military time, or other fire jargon to better explain, but this paper prints it all, as mentioned, verbatim.
One of the problems we face as disseminators of public information in the social media realm is the question of when is too much information actually detrimental.
A University of Denver study has found that the biggest reason behind Facebook unfriending is a very obvious one: too many unimportant posts or excessive posting. Although the survey related to personal Facebook pages it is still reflective of what the average social media user would also think of us cluttering up their walls.
At one time they were called town criers. When I was a kid there was always someone in the neighborhood who took the lead on posting flyers at the library on various events or spreading news by word of mouth. You always went to people like this if you wanted to spread the word “virally,” before that phrase was actually coined. Today obviously “virally” relates to having information spread across the web. Today the phrase for the old town crier is a “social informant.”
Isn’t it strange that if you are late paying your electric, gas, oil or phone bill you will usually receive a grace period due to the potential problems the lack of service might present. Obviously one can freeze to death and the amount of money owed would never compensate for that death. Local government and the utility provider would look pretty foolish if a citizen couldn’t afford to pay a bill and suffered the ultimate price.
So to put things in perspective, if you owe say $500 on an outstanding electric bill but you didn’t pay $75 to protect your house from burning down, the lights can stay on while the home burns to the ground.
At one time in public relations, scissors and glue where two mainstays of the job. You would get press, either cut the article out of the publication yourself or get it pre cut from a clipping service, glue it and place it in a scrap book with all the PR for the year. At the end of the year you would file the book with others from years gone by and have another volume of archival material. Electronic media would be obtained from a broadcasting monitoring service and also be archived in neat rows of VCR tapes. Times have obviously changed though.
In one of the more bizarre recent occurrences surrounding the amazing story of the 33 trapped Chilean miners it seems that need to express themselves clearly is towards the top of the agenda. It appears that PR types are yelling instructions down the shaft telling these guys the appropriate way to speak to the media upon rescue. If there ever was a way for the miners to get good nights sleep it would come as the result of some media consultant telling them what to say upon seeing the sunlight for the first time in months. Enough for anyone to go into a catatonic state!
While I was on the road in Texas last week I had the opportunity one night to go into my folders to review PR and marketing links and articles that I stockpile but usually put off reading. In some of my golden oldies from this past June was a video I viewed on “Tips on creating Good Web Videos.” The video was a part the Tactics Video series presented by the PRSA (Public Relations Society of America.
Nothing beats coming into work and immediately hearing “I just read the paper, it looks like you guys are in trouble again.” When I inquired into who and what was in trouble I was told that a story was in Newsday, our Long Island newspaper about the latest loser who riffled through fire department funds, betraying both his fellow brothers and sisters and the public at large.
The problem with the in your face guy who confronted me with the story before I set a foot in the door, is that he assumes all firefighters are the same and all departments are created equal. It didn’t matter to him that the ex firefighter and department in question are about 40 miles from here. For whatever reason, ours is a trade that suffers from collective guilt.
I spent part of the weekend in Orchard, Texas, cowboy country if there ever was. I went to see a few yearling bucking bulls I own buck. A few will be ready to compete in futurities this spring.
I always enjoy going to Texas, not only for a sport I love, but to meet “cowboy” folks from across the country who are involved in the sport.
Orchard, Texas can be considered “fly over” country by many elitists who think of those who sweat and toil as backward or not sophisticated. But I’ll match up any of these people against those who have no great moral fiber or don’t know what it means to get dirt under your fingers or to get knocked down, dust yourself off, shake off the pain and continue to hold your head up high.
I remember that last year I received an email from a mother in the community asking if the fire department could help her third grade daughter finish an essay she was writing about fire hydrants. I emailed back to have her daughter call me with her questions. A nervous third grader did indeed call, asked her questions, and ultimately awarded the department with a hand written thank you note on lined paper, stickers and all.
Yesterday evening we trekked out to the Suffolk County Fire Academy for a drill. The “Tower” is a facsimile of a commercial office building. I always liked this drill since in my town we have very few commercial buildings and this is our one opportunity each year to hone our skills and learn new techniques in attacking a fire in this type of structure.
Normally, as PIO, I am tasked with taking pictures and video of the drill to post online and use for internal purposes. It has been a few years since I have had the chance to do an actual hands on evolution of the Tower.
We were a little short handed on the line officer end when we left the firehouse with an Engine and Ladder. I jumped into the officer’s seat on Engine 3 to head out to the Academy.
Last month I was at a conference in Washington for an organization whose board I Chair. I was asked to give a brief presentation. I spoke, it was well received, but when I sat down the person sitting next to me whispered, “Nice job, you must have been under the gun though, you didn’t do a PowerPoint.” This got me to thinking.
Each Sunday morning at the firehouse we hold probationary training school. Due to the nature of the material we cover the advent of PowerPoint has been a boon. We can lecture, show the numerous acronyms we use in the fire service relevant to the lecture in written form on the screen and play video and still shots. All of this helps enhance our training methods. But in my overall estimation, the vast majority of times we all have to sit through tedious PowerPoint presentations can be avoided by not showing them at all.
A new form of reporting local news is taking root across America. It’s called hyperlocal and is much more nimble and reactive then traditional community news sources.
Next month I am inviting the editors of Smithtown Patch to the firehouse for a media open house. I hold these events several times a year in which I invite one media outlet at a time to come and tour our department and get to know a little better about who we are and how we serve the community. This is the first time I am inviting what at this point can be called a non traditional or newly emerging form of media.
In many of our Departments and agency’s we as PIO’s are asked to assist in the development of social media policy for our members or employees. This can be very easy or very difficult to construct and explain.
Salesforce.com is a major cloud-computing company. With over 72,000 customers involved in many different aspects of the web and social interaction the company is very sensitive to how they are portrayed via social media.
Salesforce recently released, for public consumption, their social media policy via YouTube. Although the policy is most relevant to explain to their own employees the company’s stand regarding social media at a publicly traded company, there are still valuable lessons to be learned by all.
When I need to scour lists for media contacts I use Cision. At a cost of $3,000 per year it creates a perennial sweat for me worrying whether the funds will be in the budget to cover this relatively large expenditure the next fiscal year.
I’m always on the lookout for new ways to reach out to the media. A new FREE way to gather information comes from MBlast who this month introduced MediaSync. The website helps users find relevant journalists and outlets, keep current on editorial calendars, and organize media campaigns. Although geared for marketers I have been playing with the service and find it relevant for PR use.
There is a certain group of trend arbiters around whom I envision being skinny, wearing all black, with black framed glasses who think that when they speak the entire work of public relations will turn on a dime to do their bidding.
Over the last several years I am becoming progressively irritated when PR pundits keep saying that the standard press release is dead. Maybe the body is cold from where they sit, but in our line of work the old tried and true, boring and predictable press release is our lifeline to the media.
Often we say someone is a good public speaker. But a closer look reveals that someone might be a good public speaker in one discipline while lacking skill in another spoken area.
In my mind public speaking, in our profession as PIO’s, is segmented into a few distinct areas. Throughout the year we address many different audiences in many different venues, each requiring their own specific set of verbal commands and finesse.
I read a quote online recently by Anderson Cooper that puts this discussion into perspective: “Being on camera is easy for me, but speaking in front of several thousands of people, it’s a different skill set. Making speeches gave me a nervous pit in my stomach, so I forced myself to do it.”
I consider myself, due in part to a radio and TV background, to be a pretty good overall public speaker, but when I segment my responsibilities out, the report card indicates that I do need to go to study hall in a few area’s –
I was outraged that 9/11 turned into a three ring circus of media, yes media flamed protests. A day that will never be made into a National Holiday, least the significance be diminished by future generations, who will take it as a shopping day orgy with no understanding of its implication, was tainted by a media that puts every rumor, innuendo and kook generated story on the same plain.
A lot of what we do as PIO’s is based on standard formula and template. If we are sending out releases and working with the press at an incident scene we are pretty much like baseball umpires, calling them as we see them. There is no room for embellishment or spin in our line of work. This is one of the aspects of our job that we should be thankful for when we look at the alternatives, like choosing sleazoid PR as a career specialty.
As anyone knows who reads my posts on a regular basis, I’m not a big fan of speaking to the media “off the record.” I’ve been burned a number of times over the years trying to be a nice guy, covertly helping a journalist get what I feel is the essence of a story without my direct quotes.
I usually peruse the Atlantic website to see there political take on things, but yesterday came across an interesting article looking into the world of “off the record” comments.
The article was written by Chuck Todd, the White House correspondent for NBC news and Albert Oetgen, the Managing Editor for the NBC News Washington bureau.
I found the most interesting part of the story to be the Pete Williams glossary of terms that unofficially govern the flow of information to the media in Washington.
It’s kind of strange. For all the technology I employ on the fire ground – digital SLR camera, Flip HD video recorder, Blackberry for contacting the media, Tweeting and having the media contact me, the one area I lack in is logging the written word with ease.
Currently I still rely on my old reporter’s notebook (often soggy) a pen (often lost or soggy) or notes scrawled on anything I can find that resembles paper to record what I will need to later address the press or write a release.
I noted a few posts back that I am leery of using advanced technology that can break unexpectedly on the fire ground from heat, water, debris and shock.
One area I have been researching is the possibility of purchasing a rugged convertible notebook to use on the fire ground to both record and send information about the incident I am working.
Getac just announced today that its new V200 rugged convertible notebook computer, the world’s most powerful fully rugged convertible notebook to date, coming in at just 6 pounds, will be released in October.
