New workshops in Birmingham, Cardiff, Exeter and London now booking

February 22, 2012

Due to popular demand we’ve added some more workshops on social media for emergency planning and resilience.

They suit communications staff from Category One Responders with warning and informing responsibilities as well as emergency planning staff with an interest in warning and informing and other aspects of communication in emergencies.

These one-day sessions have proved really popular. We make them interactive and use a set of real world case studies. They are tailored to the needs of Category One responders

We can also organise training for LRFs or SCGs as well as individual responders.

We’ll be in Cardiff on 23rd April 2012, Exeter 24th April, London on 1st May and Birmingham on 2nd May.

For more information and to book click here

Southsidecops: a nice case study in local policing on twitter

February 13, 2012

Social media is beginning to prove its worth in community engagement roles across public services. Some police services have had locally-based accounts for some time (notably the Greater Manchester and West Midlands forces). West Mercia are just putting their toe in the water. Of course being late to the party means you can learn from those who went before. @southsidecops seems to being doing a decent job and they came in to their own at the end of January when a suspicious vehicle caused widespread disruption.

[UPDATE: 1400 13/02/2012 Those same @southsidecops have pointed me to this blog from a local reporter which also praises their work over this incident]

Here’s an edited version of their work around that incident (bear with it it’s an embed from Storify). Click here if it’s not working for you.

The power of the picture

February 9, 2012

I was chairing a conference the other day: EPIC Social Media South West. One of the speakers was the excellent Dan Slee. He mentioned many interesting and useful things including the reminder that images work much more effectively on twitter than text. I think he said a link to a picture was 4x more likely to be clicked on than a link to a press release.

Which is all very interesting.

In an emergency do we want to be sending images out? And what would we seek to achieve? Wouldn’t a link to a public information bulletin be much more useful?

Well London Fire Brigade have been tweeting pictures of live incidents for a while

It lets people know what the service is up to and, potentially, reduces the number of curious onlookers tempted to approach the scene and get in the way. Also it will reduce harmful speculation of the nature and scale of the incident.

Yesterday the Met Office tweeted a picture

This is subtly different to what they usually tweet (which is a link to the appropriate webpage upon which this picture appears) because an image is easier to manipulate on a mobile device, and on other clients.

It has reduced functionality in other ways. A web page gives you access to links and sources of other information which aren’t available here. It’s less instant though.

Like all things in communications it’s horses for courses but there are courses where an image would make an excellent horse. He said, mangling his metaphor.

Google starts making emergency alerts more useful

February 1, 2012

Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org has just launched a new service: Google Public Alerts

Essentially they’ve put public warning messages from a number of US Federal bodies on a map.

This is the start of something exciting.

Right now the fact that you can see warnings of dangerous blizzards in Alaska, while undoubtedly useful to Alaskans, is of passing relevance to UK citizens. This is, as the Google.Org blog makes clear, just a start.

Over time the company plans to allow more agencies, from more parts of the world, submit a feed of alerts (using the Common Alerting Protocol)  The alerts will start to show up in more areas of Google’s real estate. Searches on Google Maps or in the main search function might show you relevant alerts depending on the context of where you are and what you are searching from.

Right now the only data on the service comes from US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Weather Service, and the US Geological Survey.

Google is inviting other agencies to express an interest essentially by setting up a CAP feed and sending it to the Alerts project.

This is worth paying attention to for a couple of reasons.

1. Google is big and well used so a good place to get your feeds displayed.
2. Burning a CAP feed opens a whole range of options. If every cat 1 responder had a CAP feed we could aggregate them, use them to provide timely strategic data and push them into other services to warn, inform and protect the public.