Interesting views at the Davos conference

End of August we had the pleasure to visit the International Disaster and Risk Conference high up in the mountains of Davos, Switzerland. There were breathtaking views after taking the cable-lift, but just as interesting views in the contents shown at the conference.

There was much attention for prepardeness for disasters in developing countries and other crises all around the globe. I heard interesting presentations on preparedness for bush fires in Australia and many speakers stressed the importance of social media in public discourse on risks and crises.

Trends were the emphasis on climate change and its consequences, but also attention given to improving resilience in big cities all around the world. Community approaches were common when talking about developing countries, and also mentioned in the USA and Australia, while it seems that in Europe rescue services by authorities are professional but less linked with citizen response. Communication can strengthen this. Furthermore, the role of information technology was stressed, and cooperation in multi-stakeholder networks.

Our workshop about the international FP7 project Public Empowerment Policies for Crisis Managament got interested listeners and the flyers referring to the project may increase traffic on the project website www.crisiscommunication.fi. We will be back in Davos to present more research results in 2014.

Social Media & Crises (2)

Arranging environmental monitoring requires enough manpower trained for such communication tasks. In the latest e-newsletter of the Dutch National Crisis Centre a one-day national event was mentioned during which, among others, a team of 8 media analysts was active. In the case of a breaking crisis more media analysts would have been added, next to other crisis communication experts. Now two of them focused on monitoring of approximately 4000 tweets that day. Analysing social media discourse is still time consuming but tools like Seesmic are helpful and such tools are continuously further developed. At this stage the aim is to detect information, to get an early warning of possible problems or misperceptions.

When a crisis hits, people look for information on Internet. Not many people know how to find the suitable authority webpage for the current disaster. Usually they use a search engine and type the name of the crisis. Then they first get a list of links to news sites and a diversity of other mostly non-confirmed sources. In many cases the official websites of authorities involved may not even be mentioned in the top of the search results, and this is especially lacking in the later phases of a crisis. So maybe there is a good team available providing much needed information, but their website is not found by the search engines.

For this there are several solutions. First, authorities may get higher on the list of search results by using Google Adwords. Facilitating that people connect with official crisis communication sources is not new, as for example many phones have pre-arranged the crisis notification number 112, and television channels can be interrupted for crisis messages according to regulations in many countries.

Second, one can also invite traffic to the website by own interventions in the social media, using a multi-channel approach. Tweets are an efficient way to update authority information on the crisis situation, and different public organizations involved can coordinate content and use the same hashtag. Public organizations can include links to their website in their tweets and postings on social networking sites like Facebook.

Preparedness campaigns can refer to the crisis and preparedness website and thus increase familiarity with it. Some countries have a portal leading to all kinds of governmental information and may add a clearly visible link to the website that offers information on a current crisis. This website could next to instructions and background information also include a section in which own tweets and posts are brought together on the current crisis. Websites that facilitate 112 notifications sometimes also show those notifications already given or confirmed, and may visualize this using crowd mapping. Fast procedures and an integral approach with many ways to Rome are advised.

Social media use in crises communication

Privately I’m only moderately enthusiastic about social media, but when it comes to crisis communication I must admit there are great opportunities. It is much faster and easier to update information for publics using a Twitter account than traditional media. But more importantly, there are applications people can directly contribute information to.

Most impressive are Ushadid and Crowdmap developed in Africa that facilitate reports of individual citizens and visualize them on a map. But also Google Person Finder should be mentioned, a bulletin board using open software that can be integrated in any website, and the Red Cross Family Links Webpage. These are means for crowdsourcing.

For organizations crisis communication has not become easier, as expectations are rising and they will have to use multiple channels to address a diversity of publics. Integrated communication is needed, utilizing traditional and social media, next to working with communities and intermediaries. Much preparation is needed to have hidden sites ready for various scenarios, that when they are needed can be launched fast via social media spreading the link to these websites or other open sites with information on preparedness, such as www. ready.gov.

Organizations can cooperate during an emergency, using the same hashtag or even twitter account to update information. People can be asked as eye-witnesses to upload damage pictures on Flickr, or to help clean up the neighbourhood after an incident as has happened in London after the riots. Spontaneous actions vary from linking the Facebook page on a crisis situation to one’s own, to participation in donation contests in Twitter.

Of course, there are also challenges. Monitoring what’s happening during crises in the social media is one of these challenges. Feed provided from social networks and Twitter has to be analysed, e.g. using dashboards like Seesmic and Addict-O-matic, or Europe Media monitor. There is still a lot to learn and investigate!

Creating learning experiences

Before summer the curriculum evaluations had showed that most students were pleased with our classes being more directly related to learning outcomes, which were also linked to the professional profile of our studies written by me. But some had also expressed that they would like to be more actively triggered and involved in our classes.

With the latter in mind I made an addition to the bachelor course on Reputation (Maine). Next to the group assignment some individual contributions were arranged to be shown more clearly. As always students can get more out of class meetings by their own initiative. But now we added a videotaped individual statement at the end of the course. The group work consisted of a research report investigating the reputation of the organization with a group presentation, while the individual statement was a consultancy statement in which the student would present his/her main point of advice.
This ment that students were triggered to form their own opinion based on the research material and think how they would personally as a communication expert voice their main point of advice. As the focal organization this year was the EU, this was not an easy matter. Luckily a doctoral student (staff member) was involved who had in the previous period worked for the European Parliament Information Office in Helsinki.

Throughout the course the participants indeed seemed more personally involved. The fact that one long extra day was invested by 3 members of staff (two doctoral students and me) to tape the statements and for each of the 30 students individually role the tape to give feedback, also signalled the importance of their presentations. For the students, to address the name of this blog, it caused some commotion. But it made the course more intensive and possibly also affected the good level of the group assignments.

Normally I leave the forming of the groups to the students, but this time there were even more exchange students than Finnish students and most didn’t know each other, so I arranged mixed groups during the first class. This seemed appropriate for the topic EU, and it also matched our team’s as well as the student association Imago’s aim, to include all and support interaction of exchange students with our Finnish students. At first the students needed some more time to get acquainted and get the group work going, but they said that at the later stages of the work it was beneficial to exchange views.

So in this way, we will continue to evaluate our courses and experiment with ways to intensify the learning experience of the students, creating some commotion...

Communication axioms

Some years ago I met emeritus professor Osmo Wiio, the first professor in our field at the University of Helsinki. He talked about the communication laws that he published in 1980 in a book. He gave me the idea to write my own laws. Wiio’s laws show his great sense of humour, and this would be hard to imitate, but I have now attempted to make communication axioms that we will gradually backup by research in this direction. The axioms show my approach to communication by organizations.
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1.             In postmodern society communication occurs in dynamic networks.

2.             In networked communication organizations have lost dominant voice and need to more actively monitor changing contexts.

3.             Many actors compete for attention in market and issues arenas.

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4.             Online communication creates an abundance of data and opinions, but communication is often  only seemingly two-sided and true dialogue is lacking in the social media.

5.             Individuals tend to connect with those they share interests with, which further fragments audiences and creates polarisation in society.

6.             Interactions are difficult to predict but may gain resonance fast and have global consequences.
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7.             Communication professionals need to develop smart strategies to exchange views in an open public debate and negotiate sustainable and inclusive solutions for wicked problems.

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This modern list of statements may inspire to, along these lines, together further develop the field. And if, after all of this, you would like to enjoy (re)reading Wiio’s laws, here are some links: Communication usually fails & A commentary
Marita Vos

The tragedy in Norway

In the middle of this summer of 2011, on July 22th, we were shaken by the terrible news of the Norway attacks, the bomb in Oslo and the shootings on a nearby island. Our thoughts were with the many victims of the tragedy and their families. Because we do research contributing to crisis management and crisis communication, we also wondered what could be done to prevent such matters from happening, minimise damage and help victims in such a tragedy.

Our team of OCPR also had personal reasons to be worried about the bomb in Oslo, as one of our doctoral students has an office nearby. Luckily he sent word that he was okay and not in the vicinity at that time. This doctoral student happens to focus on crisis communication in the case of terrorism and followed all the news carefully. Then we made contact with a member of the international expert panel for our projects working for the Norwegian Ministry of the Interior. He told us he had been on holiday but that the bomb had killed some of his colleagues.

We will not lightly forget what has happened. Was the violence aimed at mass media attention? This should never be a means to an end. It is the definition of terrorism, killing innocent citizens to create fear, chaos and attention. Our team feels even more resolved to contribute, in our research and education, to crisis communication and resilience of communities. In January we will start with two new international research projects, one on community approach in crisis management and another on terrorism-related crisis communication.

Marita Vos

Coproduction

OCPR is about communication management, and its core is interaction and building bridges. Organizations need open channels to exchange information with many different stakeholders about products and services but also points of view.

The field has developed much in the last decade and many may wonder who is ahead of the other: the academics researching new trends or, perhaps more likely, the communication experts in practice. I am convinced that new knowledge needs to be developed in cooperation.

OCPR will be most successful when based on a coproduction that involves staff, students and graduates. We can share experience and inspire each other. Our discipline is promising but not yet strong or big enough to maintain a clear identity and position without each others’ help.

Why would OCPR be a coproduction? It is good for graduates that employee organisations understand what the added value of communication is. It is good for the staff to be well connected. And it is good for students to hear experience of graduates.

Let us embrace this idea of a coproduction and enjoy the connections. Isn’t that anyway what our field is about: connectedness,

Marita Vos