… 10 years ago today

I stopped to watch Jack Welch being interviewed on the ‘Today’show, which was followed by some footage and telephone conversation about reports of a light plane colliding with the World Trade Centre. The second plane hitting the towers was broadcast live to air in that segment, then everybody knew it was no accident.

TV news teams are great at adapting to this kind of breaking story. Very quickly they got a bunch of experts on the telephone and speculating about what was happening. About 30 minutes later, and again live to air, one of the participants had to excuse themselves, noting that he was at the Pentagon and had just felt an explosion there.

After that I was on the phone to the airline, and discovered that I would not be flying anywahere for a while.

I was lucky enough to have a cell phone, rather unusual at that point in time to have an international GSM phone that worked in the USA, but I had one. Not that it was a great deal of value, it didnt work that day. At that time my wife did not have a cell phone, so SMS was not an option to communicate either.

For some time that day I could not make an international call to Australia using the land line phone either. But I did have dial-up internet access and the established practice of using instant messaging and presence alerting.

If you have a great plan but cannot communicate, you will fail. If you have no plan, but can communicate – then you have a chance.

This has been a truism in BC and Crisis Management for a long time – still is.

Fortunately the Head Office of the company I was working with at the time was in the UK, so had several people on line and I could assure the company I was ok.  Today I guess we would call this an example of using social media in a crisis.

I was able to communicate that day because I had established the practice of using this technology in my daily work – it is not soemthing that you can just turn-on and expect to use effectively in a crisis. You need to have established the network of people before you can effectively get your message out.

Today the cell phone is ubiquitous, and we tend to assume the network is always on. Likewise we assume the same access to the internet and more sophisticated social media tools available to us.

What has not changed in the past 10 years is that the BC industry is still band-wagon driven – so we really are not using these tools very effectively.

If you really want to look at using technology smarter, try to go beyond the Twitter and Facebook mindset;

• Why not pilot using Ushahidi for your Emergency Management purposes, or perhaps evven as a monitoring tool for Situational Awareness in other parts of the globe.
• How could you use social media checkins to establish useful fire evacuation roll calls?

The trick is to take the time to see what is out there, not just follow the latest trend.

So start looking beyond the conventional wisdom and the traditional “bodies of knowledge”.

Read widely, and across different disciplines. With the material that is available on the internet today there is no excuse.

 Above all question things – do not just accept what you are told!

While taking the time today to pay respects to those who died in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on this day in 2001. Also take the time to recall that many more died as a result of events on this day in 1973. The coup that overthrew the Allende regime in Chile.