In the first responder world there are two types of press releases, those that must be published and those that need a compelling reason to get print.
In our business if we operate at a significant fire or MVA we stand a 99.9% chance that our information will be picked up by the press. We are talking about hard news .
If we are pitching fire prevention day, our installation dinner or other similar story the chances of getting placement are greatly diminished.
It seems as PIO’s that we are beginning to look at the dawning of an era where one persons negative observation of our departments can be magnified a thousand fold through the use of social media. The power of the pen has become the power of the keyboard and we have to be prepared.
I lucked out a few weeks ago. I was in a hotel in DC setting up for an evening event when I heard a session starting in the adjoining room from a daylong conference. The topic was managing your time to perform social media duties. I heard the whole session through the wall and was actually able to glom the handout from the session afterwards when a kind participant gave me an extra copy.
My long road trip continues. While waiting for a flight in Baltimore I did a little business people watching and made an observation about something that has gradually transpired over the last year or so.
Airport seating areas used to be filled with business types fighting for the nearest electric outlet to plug in their laptops and do a little work while waiting for a flight. In a crowded waiting area where I would have a while back seen a sea of laptops, I only observed two. The vast majority were thumbing around on their smartphones.
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 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.
There’s been a lot of talk recently at conferences I have attended about whether websites have outlived their usefulness and are merely dinosaurs left over from 1990s.
I think in our line of work where fact and not hype are the foundations of our websites, a no frills approach is warranted and the website model fits quite well thank you. Whereas a consumer product or service might look to gain interest through blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube first, most folks who want fire and EMS information will visit our websites as the main source of information. With that said though our websites should still serve as portals to assist in integrating our traditional website and social media marketing efforts.
I use Twitter for my Department in a limited form due mainly to the fact that I still cannot get a total handle on its overall effectiveness in getting our message and information across to our neighbors. Every time I think of nixing Twitter when reporting on an incident something new pops up to make me realize how important it is.
When I departed Long Island for Las Vegas a few days ago I noticed that the TSA was profiling blue hair. Oh I understand everyone is on edge with recent breeches, put this was the definitive example of perhaps spending too much time on the wrong person.
There is an old adage in baseball that an umpire explaining his job once said “I calls em as I sees em.” Well it appears to me that if Justin Pizzi, a reporter at WCAU, the NBC affiliate in Philadelphia, was calling balls and strikes his career as an umpire would be over before it began.
I want to thank Doug Walton for passing along this piece which originally came from the definitive social media website Mashable. Many of the tips in the piece can be directly correlated to the types of social media we use as fire department PIO’s.
From felons on Facebook to tips through Twitter, social media is being used more and more by law enforcement agencies, and not just to fight Internet-related crimes. We’re talking about solving crimes that are happening on the street and in your community.
When I teach Probies in my departments internal fire school, I always tell them that they already know more than many veteran members. Because of the most up to date tactics that they are learning, they already have one up on the older guys who become complacent and are hesitant to constantly upgrade their skills to be on the cusp of today’s standards.
The same is true for PIO’s. If we do not constantly stay up to day on the latest trends and tools we are always taking a step backward.
I wrote a few days ago about the tragic manhole accident in my own town, Smithtown, NY, that took the life of a seventeen year old boy. The incident was toned out at 9:11pm this past Sunday night.
The media response to the incident left me wondering if the press is looking to us to do the heavy lifting for them.
This television PSA is from Great Britain. “Embrace Life” is an extremely creative and well done commercial about the importance of seat belts. It’s free to share on YouTube. 
I am going to place it on the Department’s YouTube page as well as feature it on our website with statistics about seat belt use and safety.
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.
When we signed on the dotted line to become firefighters we quickly became the guys on the other side of the yellow caution tape. While we go about our business of fire suppression or extrication or EMS emergencies the public is watching us at the scene with critical eyes. In essence we are characters in a drama being played out before them.
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