I’m very lucky to get the opportunity to attend a number of conferences, both because of my speaking engagements and because I work in an active region that regular holds opportunities for learning for members of the emergency response community. And I know that I’m lucky, so I take every opportunity to attend these conferences and trainings and do my best to share what I’ve learned as widely as I can because I know that not everyone is as lucky as I am, but they still have the need to learn about these topics.

And sometimes that can be problematic. You see, after the conference or training, I have to go back to work and back to blogging and back to my family and life. I don’t have the time repackage and redistribute this information. So I do it in real time via Twitter. And that’s problematic because I’m usually staring at my phone or tablet and typing furiously.

Think of the last time you were in a conference and saw someone pounding away at their BlackBerry. What did you think they were doing? Did you roll your eyes and wonder why they even came to the conference? Yep, that was me livetweeting.

Livetweeting. Hearing what’s being presented, digesting it, repackaging it to Twitter length, typing it up on a tiny phone screen, adding a hashtag (sometimes adding pictures) and posting it. And doing it quickly enough that I can accurately represent what’s being said and being sure to get all of the really good parts. So not only am I not not paying attention, I’m probably paying more attention than many of the glassy-eyed folks who gets the the benefit of the doubt with regards to “paying attention.”

And I’m not the only one that does this, in fact, the younger your audience the more likely they’ll be devoting time during presentations to digital devices. So what does that mean for, in each of the three roles you fulfill around presentations: as speaker, as a member of the audience, as someone who is not even at the conference.

First, as someone in the audience, this should be easy to deal with. The person sitting next to you tweeting away has identified themselves as someone who is a) taking lots of notes and b) very happy to share it. Say hi. Give them your card. Ask where you can find their notes and if you can download them. (And if they’ve just been playing Plants vs. Zombies for the last hour, they’ll totally be shamed into paying attention during the next session.) Voilà! Instant notes and a new colleague.

As a speaker, here you might need make some changes, but all of them are positive. First, every recommendation about how to improve presentations you’ll find talks about presenting less information on slides and focusing the content. This helps your livetweeters get the gist of the slide more quickly, but it will also helps your non-tweeting audience digest and integrate your presentation. One idea per slide. Plain language. Descriptive images. Your livetweeters will love you, your audience will love you and you’ll be a better presenter.

The second great reason speakers should embrace social media is all for them, they’ve got the opportunity to get real, free, unfiltered immediate feedback on their presentation. Sure it’s difficult to see it while you’re presenting (even I haven’t mastered that–yet), but if your audience all used a hashtag (maybe one that you recommended to them) think of how easy it would be to collect all of those notes into one place. What a great repository of real-time feedback on your performance, kudos you’ve received and a contact list of folks who were interested in your topic enough to come and listen to you.

As an outside observer, people using social media conferences is simply the bee’s knees. You’ve got the world at your fingertips, all you need to do is follow along. Look for the announced hashtag for the conference you find most interesting and check it out to see if anyone is tweeting during the conference! If you’re stuck for topics to follow, check out the Healthcare Hashtag Project, where folks register conference hashtags and help get a transcription of them.

The reason I bring this topic up is because of a conference I recently attended. The conference was actively advertising their hashtag and having their staff livetweet vociferously. And yet there were still complaints from folks in the audience deriding those on their phones. Which I think is a shame, for all of the potential good reasons above. What do you think about livetweeting and using social media during conferences? (And I’d love to know if you hate it!)

I’m willing to bet that you’ve engaged in some slacktivism. If you haven’t done it, and you’re on social media, you’ve definitely seen it. You know the ones: share this post to raise awareness of x, y and z. Add your signature to this virtual petition to save the whatevers. That’s the essence of slacktivism:

The word is usually considered a pejorative term that describes “feel-good” measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it feel some amount of satisfaction.

A lot of the slacktivism we see takes place on Twitter. Someone will establish a hashtag and attempt to get that hashtag to trend, or be mentioned enough times that Twitter’s algorithm will automatically push the hashtag to people’s Twitter accounts, thereby increasing the number of people aware of the ongoing action. Here in Philadelphia, we recently had an action day take place against our Health Department on Twitter. I’m not going to go into it because the topic it was attempting to spur action on is still ongoing, but it’s pertinent because this was the first time we’ve been virtually protested. And after seeing how easy it was to organize and pull off, I know it’ll happen again.

What happened, basically, was that someone posted to a website and asked their online friends to tweet at us and major media accounts using a hashtag in an effort to get us to change something we’re doing. This virtual protest was accompanied by a flood of phone calls, again, organized online.

This was kind of a traditional protest action, but it’s not the only kind, I learned. The folks at SocialMediaToday had a really interesting post on another type of protest action, a denial of hashtag event. The author described how he first accomplished a denial of hashtag event:

I quickly sent out a few emails to some lists I belong to asking folks to jump on the hashtag to tweet questions, challenges and alternative commitments to the Republican Representatives participating in the Twitter Day. I also tweeted out a calls to action and a few questions, challenges and alternative commitments of my own. Very quickly, we were able to take control of the conversation.

Now think about how your agency uses hashtags, can you imagine what you would do if the Internet started taking over the hashtag for your campaign? It’s not the same, but I experienced something similar during Delta flight 3163, which was quarantined. I tried to learn more about it as the situation unfolded, but couldn’t find anything relevant because coincidentally Lady Gaga had posted on Twitter that she was quarantining herself to work on a new album. The word quarantine was useless, and this wasn’t even a coordinated event!

Now, I wasn’t sure about even publishing this post because I like to talk about a solution or something you can do to avert or minimize the potential problem I’m describing. I couldn’t do that for this one because, well, there is no solution that I know of.

The reason I bring it up, though, is for exactly that reason. Not only will this happen more and more; as it starts happening more and more, you’re more likely to be the target of one of these attacks. Start thinking today about what you’ll do when it happens to your agency or organization. Do you inform your executive? What if they freak out and threaten to call the media? What if they tell you they don’t care about internet yahoos? What if you ignore it and the campaign makes the local–or national–news?

(Also, if you work in a traditionally government-supporting advocacy organization, think about how you could do something like this. It’s a tool and one that’s growing in utility, scope and acceptance. I always say we should be better advocates, online protesting may just be another way to do it.)

When I imagined the future of government communications, I would envision morning meetings, where the comms team (ha!) gets together, each over their own personal blend of Starbucks or locally-sourced coffee (double ha!), discusses what news is breaking, reviews where the competitors are and what their goals might be, then the team lead blesses the talking points for the day and everyone dashes off to their well-appointed, yet obviously industriously worked-in offices (triple ha!).

Aside from the fact that I obviously dream about some fantasy-land, there’s more wrong with that statement than is obvious. You see, I talked about our competitors and how my fantasy comms team would defeat them gloriously, just in time for happy hour. While it’s obvious that very few folks in government communications are concerned with our competition, and it’s even more obvious that our competitors number more than most of us can count to, that’s not the problem. You see, our biggest problem isn’t losing the battle of our public’s minds and action to some nefarious industry or trade group, it’s losing that battle because no one’s heard us. It’s losing because we’ve become irrelevant. It’s that we’re not number three or four on our public’s priority list, it’s that we’re number 100, or 1,000.

A consultant that I follow on Twitter, Steve Woodruff, had a brilliant post on exactly this topic a couple of weeks ago, and I just couldn’t shake how his message, while crafted very explicitly for the consulting world rang just as true–maybe more so–for government communicators.

[Y]our biggest competition isn’t the competition. It’s the noise in your client or prospect’s mind. It’s the boss – the kids – the schedule – the office politics – the latest health problem – the job search – the fantasy football league – tomorrow’s big presentation – the upcoming vacation – the overloaded e-mail inbox.

Don’t believe me? Monitor what’s coursing through you brain for the next 2 minutes. See what people who are fighting for your attention are up against?

Now I know I just said that we don’t care about the competition, so you’re thinking, “how does this relate to us?” It relates because we’re worse than those consultants that are so concerned with what other consultants are doing. We’re worse because we (to a large degree) still think that our messaging is the only game in town. That we speak and, as we’re the government, people should listen. We shout into that ether with full faith and belief that our message resonates above all other messages. But it doesn’t work like that.

Want to know how I know? Go back to that little two-minute exercise Steve had you do. Now think about the last message you published for work. Where did the action that message implored you to undertake rank in your two-minute ordering of life? Was it one or two? Three or four? Or more like 100 or 1,000?

And the cacophony of life is only increasing. More social networks, both in meat-space and cyberspace, more responsibilities, more deadlines, higher productivity, fewer financial cushions. You know what we need to be concerned with?

The signal-to-noise ratio. How do we put forth such a clear signal that we stand out in the minds of our clients?

So, how do YOU do it?

We are very lucky to have an amazing independent weather outlet in the Philly area. The folks at Phillyweather really get into the science of the weather and why it affects us in a particular way. When forecasting, they’ll make a call, but only after presenting all of the models and possibilities. They present the weather then get the hell out of the way. Which, if you ask me, is much better than the rigmarole you see on most morning newscasts.

The image above was tweeted from their Twitter account recently, and it really struck a chord with me. While I think that most PIOs understand that we need to get out of the way and let the doctors and chiefs and subject-matter experts do the talking, I wonder if even that small bit of control (talk now, not another time) is too much.

Think about it this way: message control does not cover just the message (the what, basically). It’s also about the who, the when, the where and the how. Who speaks, when they speak, where they speak and how it’s said all tell volumes. For my seasoned PIO friends out there, how many fights with news agencies have you gotten into over just those questions? These things are important because they affect how the message received and perceived.

Now, I’m not saying we should allow our employees to call up the media whenever they want and spout off on whatever topic comes to their head. Far from it. I think, though, that there is a middle ground. And that’s because of what social media gives us.

Your agency’s blog (you do have one, right?) is probably full of posts by your Executive, or your communications staff. (Or really hopefully at least there are some posts.) And then something newsworthy happens and you ask a subject-matter expert to write about it. In a format that they’re not familiar or comfortable with, under a deadline that they feel stressed about, and to readers who don’t know this lady from a hole in the wall. This is supposed to be helpful?

My point, and it naturally follows from last week’s post on having others write for your agency, is that we need to get the hell out of the way. Let your agency shine through every day. Give your experts the podium they deserve. Build them a following (or let them build a following).

Everyone who does the work we do knows the world is changing. Our traditional gatekeepers–the media–are going away, getting fired, or getting outgunned by citizen journalists. That means that the role that they provided us with (being a medium upon which we could conduct messaging to the public) is going away. This is the next true calling of PIOs and communicators: to be the media through which the public and our agency’s really smart guys and gals can talk.

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard the news. The federal government has been caught red-handed snooping through your cell phone calls and your internet interactions. I’m sure that by the time this publishes, there will be further revelations and much blame, laid at the feet of just about everyone including the White House, Congress, whistleblowers and the American public.

While the topic concerns me greatly, that’s not the facet of this absolute disaster I think is relevant to you all. (I plan to conveniently ignore the legality or illegality of the topic today.) For us and our ilk, I think this classic saying best describes what’s happening now:

Trust takes years to build, but seconds to destroy.

And unfortunately for many of us who work in government communications, I worry that the public will concentrate on the first part of that description of us (government) rather than the second (communicators) in light of this most recent, and latest in a series of unhappy events.

I mean, it’s not like we’re that highly trusted now, right? According to the worldwide, annual Edelman Trust Barometer, the US government is trusted by less than half of its public. You think this disaster will help?

What do we do when we have no trust left? This is not your fault, or my fault. (I check the logs, no one from the White House or Congress reads this blog. Hi NSA!) But we are the ones that have to deal with the fallout. We’re the ones who shout life-saving advice and recommendations into the ether, with nothing more than the cloak of, “they do this job because they are true believers; it’s certainly not for the money,” to protect us from the liars, the sycophants, the paranoid and the deniers. What do we do when that last shred of trust is gone?

Years we’ve spent building trust and relationships and good vibes, only to be painted over by the broad stroke of a brush meant for someone else. Someone who stepped too far, someone who took a bit too much, someone who is not us.

I don’t have an answer. All I have is the heavy sigh of a government employee who has seen this show before, who is too tired of fighting upstream every day just to do good in the world. What do we do when all that we’ve ever had going for us is gone?

A couple of weeks ago, I had the distinct pleasure and honor of hosting PIO Marcus Deyerin’s personal after-action from the Skagit Bridge Collapse. Marcus’s very first “Quick Tip to Remember” dealt with power:

Back-up power was critical. I’ve carried around a NewTrent 12KmAh backup charger in my PIO bag for several months, and used it a couple times prior, but this is the first time it seriously saved my bacon. I recharged my phone from near dead 3 times over the course of my involvement during the response. It’s worth every penny. [There are certainly other brands/models out there - this is just the one I have]

I loved this tip, because I carry something similar around and it has come in handy more times than I can count. Saved my bacon is exactly right. I wanted to call more attention to this excellent tip, but it stood very well with the rest of Marcus’s posts.

Yesterday, though, in the aftermath of a devastating tragedy in Philly, it became an issue again. Yesterday morning, a building being demolished collapsed unexpectedly into an occupied building. Thirteen people were rescued and, as of my writing this, at least two were found dead.

(As an aside, I ran my Health Department’s social media presence during the rescue and recovery operations–from the Raleigh-Durham airport–using nothing more than my personal phone, a Geofeedia search, and my personal Twitter media lists.)

Yesterday evening, as I continued to monitor the situation, I saw the first confirmation on Twitter of what sounded an awful lot like a body being found.

A group of firefighters have surrounded an area of the rubble, cutting apart boards and poking sticks through the debris—
Aubrey Whelan (@aubreyjwhelan) June 05, 2013

I headed over to the reporter’s Twitter feed to see if I could learn more and saw this tweet sent just minutes later:

Heyo, Twitter: Anyone have a portable charging device that's iPhone compatible? I am at 22nd and Market if you're feeling charitable.—
Aubrey Whelan (@aubreyjwhelan) June 05, 2013

She had a scoop and was rapidly losing juice, losing power in her phone. If only she’d seen Marcus’s quick tip about having a battery back-up.

I think eventually she found power because she continued posting for several more hours, offering detailed descriptions of what ultimately was a recovery mission.

Two ambulances are backing up toward the rubble. Firefighters crouched down pulling out wood fragments by hand.—
Aubrey Whelan (@aubreyjwhelan) June 05, 2013

Three medic units are now outside the Salvation Army store. Firefighters holding some kind of tarp up on the rubble.—
Aubrey Whelan (@aubreyjwhelan) June 05, 2013

My tip to you–whoever you are working in communications, public information, reputation management, social media, public relations–is this: buy one of these battery packs for your phone (Lifehacker recently did a best five comparison of them, so if you want to shop around, do so) and carry it with you at all times. You never know when you’ll need more juice.

(Personal note: This is a terrible, tragic situation. I go to bed tonight with a heavy heart. I knew that Salvation Army and had shopped there more than a few times. I know the good work that the people there did. Today was hard, and my only hope is that my work helped someone somewhere cope, comprehend or just see the valiant efforts of Philly’s finest and bravest.)

Last week, I wrote about how regular posting is good for your views. (I’m working on proving it again with a few weeks of steady posting, we’ll see how that goes.) I’m not so far up my own butt to realize that what I’m recommending (see yesterday’s post on the social-ecological model) is really, really hard. Post all the time? Do more than just message? Partner with everyone?

Well, I can’t help with all of that, but I can help with a bit of it. The idea for this post actually came from the comments of that “Takes a Lot of Work” post. (See, there’s another reason to comment; think of all the cool people you’ll meet!) The thrust of my recommendations is this: ask for help.

Help! Help from all of the folks that you work with, help from your subject-matter experts, help from experts in the field, help from non-experts who have a unique way of seeing something. Your agency’s blog doesn’t have to be shouldn’t be a one-man or -woman show. Even restricting posts to just your communications team only gives your readers part of the story. Besides the fact that it can easily lead to burn out.

Frankly, I can’t really state it better than my wonderful commenters, so I’ll cede the floor.

Raed Mansour:

Every single employee generates content without even knowing it. Studies, observations, initiatives, ideas, meetings, etc. It’s not that hard to come up with 200 words of genuine, high quality content when you have a few hundred employees, or even as little as 5 employees. Plus, it stops the “hey, did you mention what I’m working on” routine.

Leah Roman:

I know for my own blog, it has been challenging to always hit my goal of posting once/week. To help out when I’ve been on travel or on deadline, I’ve also reached out to guest bloggers- that can be a nice addition to your content. Perhaps once/week or once/month organizations can solicit a post from an expert in the field?

Different voices, different points of view, different writing styles, all supporting the one great goal of your organization. All interacting with the public, all enjoying seeing their name in print, all getting more recognition for that crazy idea they had. Why aren’t we doing this, again?