Deckers Marketing

This post and subsequent discussions can now be found at the Professional Blog Service blog.

A couple years ago, I worked at the Indiana State Department of Health as the Risk Communication Director, otherwise known as “Oh shit!” PR. (Because that was my first reaction every time one of the epidemiologists called me with an emergency like this recall of lead-contaminated children’s library toys (my first incident, two weeks after I started the job. I swore a lot that week). Or this. Or this. That’s when I had to deal with the media, who sometimes had the same reaction.)

When I was the ISDH, we still had our feet firmly planted in the 20th century. Sure, we were using email and BlackBerrys to communicate with each other, but it was 2006 and we were, well, using email and BlackBerrys to communicate with each other. To make matters worse, if we had to email each of the state’s 94 local health departments (LHDs) – we had a distribution list, which made life easier – it could quickly get clogged with Reply Alls, email threads that were miles long, and 94 people all chiming in at once with a their thoughts about what to do about this particular incident, or what everyone’s response should be.

We occasionally did exercises with the Indiana Department of Homeland Security, and they had an expensive piece of software that was supposed to monitor this sort of thing, but it was heavy and cumbersome and a general pain in the ass to learn, let alone use. You could put in information, sort of like a wiki, but it was awkward to access, and you couldn’t easily find the information if you weren’t familiar with it.

Enter Twitter. It slices, it dices, it lets you easily follow as many people as you want. For free. (And since state and federal government budgets are being cut, especially those in the Preparedness world, free is about the only way to get new technology now.)

With the increased popularity of Twitter, this has become an important tool for anyone in the crisis response business to use. And since many first responders use BlackBerrys, this is still a viable option.

So how can 94 LHDs hop on the Twitter bandwagon and use it to keep up with what’s going on in your district, the state, or even the country. Here’s a step by step process of what to do, what to use, and where to find it.

1. Set up a Twitter account for your LHD. Go to www.Twitter.com, and sign up for one using your county and title. If you’re the Local Public Health Coordiantor (LPHC) for Clark County, register as Clark_LPHC. If you work for the state, use the agency acronym and your title (ISDH_RiskComm)(Government types LOVE standardized naming systems, and this makes it easy for people to see where you’re from, and what you do. Plus, it makes you NIMS compliant.)

Be sure to fill out your bio, including your role and the name of your local health department. Be sure to include the name of the state too. (You’ll see why in a minute.). Try to avoid abbreviations like LPHC, in your bio.

“Bob Smith is the Local Public Health Coordinator for the Clark County Health Department in Indiana.”

If you want to set up a personal account, be sure to use your home or private email. Don’t tie it in to your work account. If you leave the position, you don’t want to lose access to this account.

IMPORTANT: During setup, click the Protect My Updates box if you want to keep your Tweets (Twitter messages) private. This may be important during a public health emergency. If you want the public to be able to follow you, consider setting up an account for the whole department (ClarkCounty_HD).

2. Go to http://search.twitter.com or www.Twitterment.com and do a search for other LPHCs. Use “Public Health” and “Indiana” in your search terms. Follow those people. You will also receive an email whenever someone follows you. You’ll need to approve them, since you protected your account.

3. Download TweetDeck, a Twitter client you can use on your computer desktop. You can create different columns to collect groups of people you follow. Create a group for your district, and one for your county emergency response departments (because you’re going to get them to use this, right?).

I also like Twhirl, a client that lets you run several accounts in several windows at once (TweetDeck doesn’t). However, Twhirl only has a single column view, not groups, like TweetDeck. You may have to make a tradeoff, or during an incident, run both programs on two different computers or monitors.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss how health departments and first response agencies can use Twitter to monitor public health emergencies.

Tweet This Post Digg This Post Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

Bookmark It

Hide Sites