Emergency preparedness for web teams

Should web publishing staff be actively involved in emergency preparedness training?  

 

I’m not talking about social media – I think it’s becoming more mainstream to include SM in emergency response, and therefore in training exercises. Just think of Twitter Gritter, or look at the way BTP tweets to let people know when there’s a ‘one-under’. In this blog I’m thinking of the day-job web officer who may be uploading the press releases (you’re lucky if your press officer can do it themselves), and is certainly publishing the supporting pages - FAQs (*shudder*), detailed professional guidance and pithy public advice. 

 

Of course a lot of this depends on your organisational structure; this is another argument for close integration between the press office, social media and the corporate website. But too often the web team are still seen as the dumb, mechanical tool of the organisation – no more responsive than a typewriter being used to bash out the latest media statement.

 

While it’s important that the web team shouldn’t hold things up in an emergency by querying every misplaced comma, they do have a significant and enduring contribution to make. They’re not just there to provide something for your tweets and Facebook pages to link to, or to generate a ‘further information’ URL to add to your Notes to Editors.

The supporting pages that your web team publish are the ones that are going to be pored over, not just during the crisis, but in future when people look back to see how you handled the situation. It’s not much good if you can’t find them through Google or your own site search, if they break when you look at them on a Mac or mobile, or if it’s hard to navigate to them logically through your IA. A naff little homepage ‘quick link’ can’t stay there forever, and won’t help with future SEO.

Your web team must be able to stay calm in a crisis and have the tools to do their job. This means: 

• They need to understand the organisation’s processes for responding to a major incident (What’s the target response time for this? Who needs to sign off before a page is published? Who should be told if someone spots an error or ambiguity? Who needs to be sent a link as soon as the page is live?).
• They also need to have experience of working under pressure, so that they can anticipate their own fallibility (Does this need a second pair of eyes?) and perceive errors in judgement in others who are stressed (Do you really want to move that web page now? You do realise it will break the link that you’ve just sent out in a press release?).

So next time you’re planning a major incident exercise, think about your back-office webbies as well as your PR team.

What to Tweet: ideas for everyday organisational tweeting

Congratulations on setting up your corporate Twitter account. Now: what are you going to say?

For public sector organisations who are only just starting out, it can be daunting coming up with enough material to create a useful, active account.

Sometimes we all get tongue-tied when faced with “What’s happening?”

This is my go-to list, but I’d love to know what other types of tweets you post regularly.

News and media

• Press releases – as long as they are not the only things you tweet. If you publish them on your website you may be able to generate an RSS feed to automatically post these to Twitter. 
• Breaking news, such as disruptions to services or major incidents. Ensure you have the appropriate authorisation in place and it is part of your overall communications and media handling strategy. 
• Positive news stories about your organisation. Even if they’re almost word-for-word reproductions of your press releases, the headlines used by newspapers are often more attention-grabbing, plus radio and TV news sites may contain supplementary audio or video clips. 
• Instances of your experts talking about national issues in the media, being published or receiving awards - even better if you can trail them in advance of a TV or radio appearance.

You could also publish rebuttals of negative news stories, but treat with extreme caution especially if it’s an emotive or sensitive issue. If you get a direct question by @ or DM, seek an official line and advice from your press officer. It may be appropriate to steer the discussion offline. And sometimes it’s best to stay quiet.

Web, print and multimedia content

• Links to new content, or existing content that you’re particularly proud of or that is particularly topical. This could be:
  
  • Video
  • Photos
  • Patient experiences 
  • Departments or services 
  • Transactions that can be carried out via your website
  • Job vacancies
  • Performance measures and statistics
  It’s ok to pick a random piece of content. People don’t read your Twitter account like a book so most of them they won’t remember you tweeted the same video when it was first put on YouTube 6 months ago and even if they do it might remind them to watch it, comment or retweet it. But don’t spam everyone with the same video every day for a week.
• New publications, such as your annual report, corporate plan or even simple leaflets. If you have a regular magazine, you can tweet that the new issue is out, and repeat this while highlighting various articles over the following days. 
• Your other channels (sparingly, as channels can attract disparate audience segments). Tell your Twitter followers you’re on Facebook, YouTube and Quora, as well as on the end of the phone.

Promotion

• Events such as open days and meetings. Trail them in advance. Invite questions before and during. Tweet updates and multimedia during the event, and link to the minutes, transcript or other records afterwards.
• Fundraising for your organisation. You can’t link to each individual’s JustGiving page but you can draw attention to big charitable events or outstanding achievements.
• Advice and campaigns. Whether it’s the winter flu jab or a campaign to keep a particular service in operation, Twitter can gather people together and spread messages. The messages you see on posters round your organisation can become the theme of a week’s tweets and you can invite interaction, comment and support, as well as sharing evidence and arguments.

Feedback

• RT compliments from service users – with caution. Do ensure you put the tweet in context by researching a little way into the timeline. It would be insensitive to retweet a compliment about your cancer nurses when the author’s father has just passed away on the ward. And ensure you also thank the user.
• Invite comment. You’re on a social platform. Ask questions and request feedback about your organisation but ensure it’s then channelled appropriately.

Community

• Local news and events, especially those that are related to your organisation’s area of expertise and the interests of your followers. Thus local councils, health service, emergency services, universities, community groups and charities might, for example, retweet selected items of one another’s content. This adds to the sense of community and you may like to adopt a geographical hashtag.
• Relevant national news and events, especially if you can add a local spin.

Inspired?

There’s no magic formula about how many tweets you should issue per day and it’s certainly better not to tweet than to constantly spam your followers (what not to tweet is a whole ‘nother blog post). One or two pithy nuggets a day might be quite enough, if the quality is high. Test different styles and frequencies on your particular audience, and see if it has an effect. The worst crime of all is silence – registering an account and never using it, or using it a few times then drying up completely.

Tell me about your sources of inspiration and what you think of my list.

#oceanward – tweeting a day in the life of a children’s heart unit

This blog post was first published on the NHSSM (NHS social media) blog.

Inspiration struck only an hour after we first became aware of #Walsall24, during a team brainstorm about raising Southampton’s profile in the Safe and Sustainable national children’s heart surgery review. Walsall Council had followed in the footsteps of Greater Manchester Police’s 24-hour tweet, but so far, we 

weren’t aware of an NHS tweetathon.

Tweeting the activities of an entire hospital would have been a logistical nightmare but following a single specialist service seemed a more manageable proposition, and the campaign to differentiate the Trust from our rivals seemed an opportune moment for a social media experiment.

It would be partly a gimmick – doing a UK first in order to gain press attention. But we had a less cynical purpose. #oceanward would aim to highlight the wealth of specialist knowledge, the volume of work, the complexity of procedures and depth of ongoing care on our specialist children’s heart ward. It would also give a human face to the patients and families whose lives would be fundamentally affected by the loss of the second highest quality service in the country.

We moved quickly in case any of the other at-risk cardiac centres had the same idea. #Walsall24 happened on Thursday 3 March and we tweeted #oceanward on Friday 11, deliberately coinciding with the visit of local councillors (among them the social-media-savvy Leader).

Telling a story

In order to control the message (specialist, professional centre of excellence) and draw our audience into the human stories before we punched through with the calls to action, we wanted to produce an overall narrative that followed patients through their day. We therefore decided to write the tweets as observers rather than handing over to the staff as first person tweeters. Given the tight timescales this was a pragmatic approach that also solved the problems of providing training or setting up multiple accounts and meant the nurses and doctors could go on with their daily business with minimal distraction. But I’d certainly like to experiment further and have the staff themselves tweeting a service.

Although the whole communications team supported the effort, coordinating the press coverage, taking photos and helping keep conversation flowing while we had our noses in our iPods, most of the tweeting was carried out by just two of us. Michelle Harris, communications manager, and I both regularly tweet as @SUHT so our conversational register was already established. As the day progressed, we read each other’s tweets to cement the tone and ensure continuity in the patients’ stories. One keen follower told us that the Tweets read “almost like the script of a TV programme”.

Live and unedited

Aside from a handful of scheduled tweets containing long URLs and a cheat-sheet of staff names (we gave up and called Dr James Gnanapragasam just ‘Dr James’) we didn’t plan or plant anything; it was a genuine live action tweet-along of activities as they unfolded. We first met the patients and families on the morning and although the staff had been primed about our visit, we introduced ourselves to them as we introduced them to our audience.

Staff and families alike were welcoming, tolerant and selfless in allowing us access to almost all areas. This was at least partly because everyone is aware of the threat of closure and is passionate to do everything they can to save the unit.

We did back off a few times to preserve privacy and dignity, and some patients were not named because their families were not available to consent. Even though we only used first names and ages (“Evan, 11 days”), consent was vital because these patients could be readily identified by family and friends reading our tweets at home. One follower used an @ to SUHT to wish good luck to her friend who was waiting for her son to go down to surgery, and NHS Plymouth sent best wishes to a patient who had been transferred to us.

Practical considerations

We’d aimed to tweet at least every 5 minutes and in the end managed around 200 updates during our 12 hour shift.  We did have the option of tweeting from desktop computers but roving the ward with iPod Touches was much more convenient and flexible, and produced more immediate results; we were thankful for flawless cooperation from IT, giving us temporary access to the secure wireless network.

We had no budget so used personal iPods and made do with our existing digital camera. Colleagues uploaded the pictures back at the office, which is why the Twitpics in our timeline are out of sync with events on the ward. The photos did get some of the greatest numbers of re-tweets so not doing more of those or having a mobile device with a camera are among our regrets.

Spreading the word

Our press release was picked up on the BBC website and local press and commercial radio. India Knight and the Department of Health retweeted us, and the council and leading Southampton twitterers also boosted our reach. The emotive nature of the campaign meant we also got some great online interaction with families of patients and other supporters. Overall they issued more than 50 impassioned retweets and sent us over 90 @ messages, including personal requests for us to pass on thanks to particular doctors, to which we happily acquiesced and responded.

At one point around lunchtime Tweetreach.com gave us an audience of nearly 50,000, and we gained 103 new followers for @SUHT over the course of the day, a more than 10% increase.

We didn’t get quite the amount of coverage we might have done (one national broadcaster was lined up to air the story but pulled it) because naturally a lot of air time and news pages went to the Japanese earthquake, but that was rightly so and of course outside our control.

Transcript of #oceanward