Algonquin College social media class (may not be exactly as shown)

After some time working on the staff side of Algonquin, I’m returning there as a part-time prof in the Social Media Certificate program. The program offers people an elementary education in social media. And I get to do the introduction to social media course.

While Joe will be teaching online, I’ll be sweating it out in the classroom. I suppose it’s fitting that the younger of us will be teaching online, while the … not so younger… of us will be doing it old-school.

Some might think an introductory course is not the most exciting. But I disagree — I think that the introductory course is the place where people should be coming in with questions and perceptions that challenge the status quo. I’m looking forward to providing a basis for the rest of their courses and to maybe even having some of my sacred cows given a bit of a going over too!

It’s been a while since I’ve taught on a regular basis, but doing training and guest lectures has kept me fairly sharp. If you want to subject yourself to me blathering on… Do so at your own risk. Hope to see you in class.

Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone

I got to Social Capital Ottawa late. Not surprising. It’s Saturday, and homemade buttermilk pancakes with fresh berries and maple syrup take priority for me over almost anything. Then my main commuting bike had a flat, so had to change plans for the bike. Anyway, I arrived late.

As I walked into the room, I realized that this felt… awkward. As conference organizer and  poohbah Lara fake-scolded me — “You’re late” — it felt like a time machine. Eyes swiveled toward me, and I had to make my sheepish way to an open seat to get into the keynote speech that was underway.

I had changed worlds. Someone wiser than me once said that “we shape our buildings, then our buildings shape us.”

There’s a long tradition in education, from kindergarten up through post-secondary. The teacher goes to the front of the room. Then the students sit in orderly rows and columns and listen with varying degrees of attention to what the teacher is saying. People raise their hands when they have a question. People are chastised for talking in class.

The worlds we live in aren’t like that any more. We’re anarchists. We surf from place to place, we chat in three places at once. We don’t sit in rows. We obey the law of two feet. What am i saying? I’m saying that classrooms are not designed for conferences. At least these classrooms, for this type of conference. Why?

• Because the multimedia is focused on the front of the classroom, where the REAL experts are.
• Because the entrances to the room are behind the speakers, the doors are loud when they open and close, and people have to walk past the speaker and in front of the entire room when they enter. If the doors are propped open, alarms sound.
• Because the furniture is bolted to the floor, and chairs mounted on swivels squeak incredibly loudly when you cross your legs, you shift in your seat, or otherwise behave like a sentient being.
• Because there’s excited chatter in hallways that you hear when the doors open up that makes you want to be there.
• Because if you sit in front, the rest of the room has to stare at the back of your head, and if you sit in back, you stare at the backs of the heads of everyone else in the room.

I spent the majority of a decade doing PR in the education field. And until I did this conference, I hadn’t really thought about the experience of classroom education in this way.

If I were back in school, how would I find this space? I suspect I would find it awful. How do those who teach in that space find it? Do they like it? Is there another way?

Regardless of the thoughts the physical setting inspired in me, the conference itself was a smashing success. Some great sessions, and it was especially refreshing to see some UN-familiar faces in the audience and on the stages. Not that I don’t like the people who are relatively well-known in the social media community here, but it’s also great to see it expand. Congratulations to the whole conference committee on their work.

(Special note to Amy Boughner: I was happy to type this post with BOTH hands.)

I got pointed back to the topic when I learned that there was another stolen laptop incident in New Orleans, at Tulane University. The details are these. While the university closed for the Christmas holiday, a staffer in the human resources shop thought he would get some work done on the W-2 forms necessary to produce for each of the more than 10,000 people employed by Tulane. Fine. He brought home the records on a laptop. The records were unencrypted. Uh-oh. The employee left the laptop in his car and went out of town. Uhhhhh-oh. The laptop was stolen. Now records including Social Security numbers, salaries, and other information that is classified as confidential by the university are in the hands of the thief.

There are obvious lessons to be learned, and obvious mistakes here. I’m not going to go into those. They should be self-evident.

But here’s where I am going: as organizations, you need to ensure that your employees are (a) aware, and (b) trained to act on, the sensitivity of your data.

I’ve worked at two post-secondary institutions, and there was very little talk of IT security. One opportunity to refresh my education was when Canada introduced the Personal Information and Protection of Electronic Documents Act (known to normal humans as PIPEDA). That required some extensive training for anyone with access to the database program our fundraisers used (which I had, subject to limits). But overall, I’d wager that this is how things are at most organizations:

So if I’m right, why aren’t employees more sensitive to these issues? Because there’s plenty of information out there suggesting that this is a BIG problem. One 2009 report for Dell by Ponemon showed that three-quarters of IT directors surveyed knew of a case in which their organization’s data had been put at risk because of a lost laptop (not even COUNTING all the other IT threats). Another Ponemon survey showed that nearly 4 in 10 data breaches occur because of lost or stolen laptops or mobile devices. That same study pegs the cost per record of stolen data at over $200US. (If that math works for Tulane, that’s a cost of two million bucks.)

So what’s to be done?

I’d bet that most organizations have IT security policies in place. Tulane has one. I’ve read it. All 14,000 words of it.

I’ve found countless other ones like it for universities, colleges, and other institutions and organizations.

It it reasonable to think that a 14,000 word policy is going to be regularly read — even by the IT staff or the HR staff? I don’t think so. I’d suggest that organizations of all shapes and sizes need to bring some resources to bear to make their employees far more cognizant of the risks to the organization and to themselves of sloppy data security.

If communicators are going to be counsel to their organizations, they should be scanning the horizons for threats. This su

re as hell is one. And I think that we communicators ought to lead it, rather than wait for the IT or HR staff to come to us.

As Maximus might say: Who’s with me?

A KWTV picture of a flyer for the lost computer

My head is still spinning a little bit in the wake of reading about University of Oklahoma researchers Ralf Janknecht and Shin Sook.

Having spent more than a few years in campus communications, part of me has been thinking about what is happening at the University’s communications shop this afternoon, in the wake of the revelation that a car breakin that occurred while the researchers (who are also a couple) were eating has left them without years’ worth of research data on prostate cancer.

The data were stored on a MacBook not unlike the one I’m typing this on. According to the researchers, there are no backups of the data.

Obviously, this is a tragic turn of events. While I don’t think the media hype on the story is necessary — CURE FOR CANCER LOST — who’s to say that the data in question isn’t valuable? Certainly not me. The tragedy here is that the data need never have been lost. I’m a single person office, and I have two separate backup systems going. When I’ve worked in institutional or corporate settings, servers were backing up data each night.

The failure of the researchers to do either personal backups or to have housed the data on a university network where it would be subject to backup is a stunning piece of bad judgement. It was also, for what it’s worth and according to my reading of university policy, a contravention of the IT policy in place at OU. Given that the university’s IP policy states that all discoveries are property of the university, they’ve also acted rather cavalierly with university property.

Here’s my Friday marching orders to all you communicators out there:

• Take this unfortunate incident as an opportunity to open up a discussion with your IT department and research office.
• Develop a plan to promote the responsible use of backups.
• Educate your researchers as to why this is important.
• Work with your IT department to make it easy and fast.

Even if there’s a 1 in 10,000 chance that the data lost contained a cure for prostate cancer — if it’s never recovered there’s a 0 in 1 chance that it will do us any good.

UPDATE, January 18: Somebody pointed me to another similar case in Louisiana. In this one, a Tulane University employee took a laptop home to work on tax forms over the Christmas break. The laptop was left in a locked car while the employee was out of town. The car was broken into and the laptop — with “W-2 information, names, Social Security numbers, address and salary for every employee, including student and part-time employees and anyone who will receive a 2010 W-2″ for 10,000+ people on it in unencrypted form — is now in the wind. Access to the laptop is password protected, apparently, and the university is offering a year of credit monitoring to all those affected . Still, another example of how data security is crucial.

Here in Ottawa, Mayor Jim Watson was sworn in, along with the 24 city councillors, 10 of whom were new to council. That’s a big turnover in municipal politics, where incumbents are generally thought to have a great advantage in election races.

The ceremony was marked by a couple of interesting symbolic actions. First, instead of City Hall, the ceremony was held at the Shenkman Arts Centre, a new city-owned arts facility in Ottawa’s suburban east end. And second, rather than a wine and puff pastry reception, Watson ‘called a friend at Tim Horton’, and the ceremony featured donated coffee, cookies and donuts from the company. Apparently that saved taxpayers $25,000. Yay, I guess.

Eric Darwin of the truly excellent West Side Action blog attended the swearing-in ceremony. One paragraph way down in his post about the ceremony really caught my attention(emphasis mine):

While chatting with a new councillor and a few other residents, someone pointed out I wrote the West Side Action blog. The conversation then turned to the blog, recent posts, the value of the micro-reporting on neighborhood affairs … and I noticed the councillor had drifted away, no longer centre of attention. Conclusion: Councillors, start a blog today, blog daily, if you don’t write it yourself get a staffer to do so, and write in plain English and not bureaucratese. Get someone who can spell better than me.

Compare this with some similar advice given to Carleton University by David Reevely, the “Greater Ottawa” blogger (also truly excellent, by the way) at the Ottawa Citizen yesterday(again, emphasis mine):

People want to talk to people, not to Carleton as a corporate entity. There are no people [on Carleton's new community engagement site]. It’s just an empty room. Maybe Katherine Graham could blog. Just her — no committee approving the posts and making sure they all align with Carleton’s strategic plan and have enough Latinate words in them. Just be a human being talking about work she’s proud of.

Sensing a theme here, folks? Is it a sign of a collective failure that 10 years after Pyra Labs launched Blogger, this advice still has to be given? And attention Rob Ford: it’s not free, but it’s pretty close, and I’m sure we’d all be entertained.

First, there’s a long and entirely worthwhile story in the Ottawa Citizen today about how the federal government responded to the magnitude 5.0 earthquake that hit Ottawa last June.

On June 23 at 1:41, life was proceeding in Ottawa as normal. City council was meeting, the New Democratic Party was preparing to make an announcement, people were preparing for the G8 and G20 summits in Toronto and Muskoka that were happening that weekend, etc. Then… this happened.

Buildings across the city were evacuated, and media and the public began to look for information about the earthquake.

But as Tom Spears writes in the Citizen story, precious little information was available from Canadian authorities.

Within minutes of the quake, the Earthquakes Canada web went down, quickly followed by the phone lines for public and media information.

The first government update cited news reports of the magnitude, not its own sources.

Media began to rely on the US Geological Survey, while in some cases complaining about a lack of response from Canadian government sources. People who had actually experienced the earthquake were leaving firsthand reports at the USGS site. Earthquakes Canada has the same functionality… but it was down.

An hour later, a twitterer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation said “Pretty sad that the traffic has totally wiped out NRCan’s earthquake site. Emergency preparedness much?”

At 4:25, a media conference call was planned. The call was scheduled for 6:00 pm. The media advisory went out … at 6:24. Only three outlets were on the call. Not surprising.

One academic claims this is a result of a general desire for control from the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office.

The department provided a statement to Spears, telling him that improvements have been made in web functionality, and that the failures of systems seen on the 23rd had nothing to do with true emergency communications networks between agencies.

That may well be true. But as a communicator who’s dealt with a few crises and who’s prepared for a bunch that haven’t yet happened, it seems to me that there were some missteps here.

• The surge capability of the Earthquakes Canada site was obviously not there, and its phone system wasn’t sufficiently robust.
• There were far too many approvals necessary to allow seismologists to start informing media
• There weren’t pre-approved templates for crisis media advisories and the like which could have been issued without translations
• There were too many layers of approval and not enough delegation to responsible public servants

Second, the University of Ottawa had an unfortunate incident take place last week. When it was testing its emergency-notification text-messaging system, it sent a notification of a violent intruder to about 3,000 members of the university community. The message read:

“LOCKDOWN in effect! Violent aggressor {in/at XXX location}. Stop all activities. If possible, close and lock the door, and turn off lights. Silence cell phones. Keep away from doors and windows. If it is safe to do so, close blinds. Take cover and remain quiet until authorities instruct otherwise.”

A number of classrooms did exactly as the message said, until about 20 minutes later, when an all-clear message was sent. Was this a fail? I’m not sure it was. I think it’s obvious that sending out the templated message was a mistake. But there was little real harm done, and rather than reduce the credibility of the university’s emergency communications, it may have reinforced in the university community that the system will work in the event that something does happen.

To sum up the lessons that I take from this:

• Crises are going to tax all the resources of your organization. Make sure that your crisis plans assume almost total breakdown of systems and will allow you to operate with minimal functionality. One place where I was involved with crisis planning wanted to develop a “dark site” using FTP technology that would require complicated (at least to me) software and seemed to me to be almost impossible to predict would work efficiently in a real crisis. I argued for a WordPress-based site that could be updated from anywhere with Internet connectivity or from a smartphone.
• In large organizations, make sure your communication plans are shared and tested with the other key elements of the organization and that you’ll all know how to react.
• When you’re testing, it’s likely a good idea to tell people about the testing in advance. Saves a moment or two of stress.
• Have someone on your crisis team who can summon the most pessimistic scenarios you can imagine. If you prepare for the absolute worst, you’ll be better able to deal with only the moderately bad. (For some reason, I secretly love doing this type of stuff.)

And the final secret you might be interested in:

I think that while nobody wants to see a crisis or disaster happen, it can often be one of the most exciting times to be a communicator. Crises tax people’s brains and judgment to the maximum. They’re like intense workouts for the brain. And the more prepared you are for the crisis, the better you perform, and the more the experience feels rewarding rather than disheartening.

This was BIG news in Canada, and some universities used their Maclean’s ranking as part of their marketing and recruitment activities. At the university I worked at, we were much less comfortable doing that. Was that because we were never at the top of our class? I can tell you no, but I don’t know if you’ll believe me or not.

It’s worth noting that at one point, a consortium of universities tried to organize a boycott of Maclean’s, refusing to provide them with data. The goal was to either stop the rankings entirely, or to influence how the data were crunched and presented.

So our standard lines were along the lines of …

• “The Maclean’s rankings are one measure of some aspects of performance of universities.
• We have issues with the way Maclean’s collects and analyzes data.
• We don’t celebrate when we rise or mourn when we fall.
• We will look at the numbers and see if there are things we can focus on to improve the university experience for our students.”

Humans have a natural desire to rank and to rate. Who’s best? Who’s worst? And one truth that is sometimes forgotten in the quest to rank is this: even if everyone’s excellent,  SOMEONE has to be worst. One of the big problems with the Maclean’s rankings (from the universities’ perspective) was that the rankings weren’t accompanied by a score. Now, you don’t know if the point-spread between #1 and #20 was 5 “points” or 50.

Education rankings, whether in Canada or the US, are big business. For Maclean’s, it means an extra 500,000 readers for their Universities issue. I’ve no doubt advertising is charged at premium rates too. Maclean’s also packages the material into an annual guide that sells for $20. In the States, US News and World Report has just announced it’s killing its print editions… except for the university rankings and other special issues.

And the ranking mania has moved to public schools. Here in Ottawa, the local paper publishes a ranking of public schools that is prepared by the Fraser Institute. And in Los Angeles, you can even get rankings for your teacher, thanks to the Los Angeles Times. The Times hired a consultant who crunched achievement test scores, then produced reports on how each teacher and school did on “value-added” — essentially how much each teacher or school improved a child’s achievement test scores. The teacher or the school’s performance was charted like this:

So what’s wrong with this? Shouldn’t people be assessed and evaluated? In Washington, DC, the “Schools Chancellor” fired more than 200 teachers in July based on their effectiveness rankings.  The Times coverage suggests that this is a step up from, or at least an add-on to, traditional teacher assessment methods. This is how the Times describes those methods:

teachers’ performance reviews, which are overwhelmingly based on short, prearranged classroom visits by administrators and other subjective measures.

All of this would be — pardon the pun — academic. But for the fact that some people believe a teacher who received poor rankings committed suicide. There’s no way of knowing what brought the teacher to kill himself.

But I guess the questions that are going around in my mind is this:

• When is it appropriate to identify and assess the performance of people publicly?
• Where does performance assessment end and shaming begin?
• Can ratings and aggregate scores be trusted to make firing decisions?

We PR folk talk a lot about performance measurement, and we do so because we believe in it. But if you can’t temper numbers with humanity, what’s the point?

And one evergreen part of the event is the walkabout. This is the part of the event where the politician, accompanied by his or her entourage as well as officials from the institution, leaves the podium and then wanders around an area looking at stuff that’s related in some way to the announcement.

Talking about water purification? Check out this demo: EcoVu water purification.  Announcing new money for education? Hit a classroom or computer lab. Health care announcement? Check out a nursing lab.

This gets done for a couple of reasons. The most important one from my perspective has always been that it’s hard for TV to cover an announcement with just pictures of the politician speaking. You need stuff on tape that the reporter can write over. And in some cases, the politicians are actually interested.

But this morning’s Daily Intel slide show is the epitome of the photo-op: A History of Obama Feigning Interest in Mundane Things. If you’re a communicator or a political aide, view and chuckle knowingly. Or weep. Or both.

Obama feigning interest in a screw

Victoria’s Secret apparently introduced a line of clothing called “Pink Collegiate” last year (which makes its “A TRADITION OF EXCELLENCE” crest a little silly, but I digress…), and started with a list of about 30 US schools.

Then they asked users to vote for their school to be included in their branded merch. But they apparently didn’t count on creative computer types at various schools gaming the voting.

Then a dude from Drexel University spent three minutes writing a Perl script, and 12 hours later he’d logged 5 MILLION votes for his school. Then a guy at Texas Tech wrote a script that auto-voted Zion Bible College into the top 10 (Not sure there’s a lot of Victoria’s Secret being worn at ZBC, although there are likely a few well-pawed catalogues floating around the dorms.)

Then a mass attack from MIT crashed the Pink system. (favorite quote of the whole story, from an MIT student: “at MIT we are motivated by the ridiculous to do this kind of thing…”

AFTER that, Victoria’s Secret put a captcha in place to limit voting.

Not hard to see that the lingerie folks were a little naked in terms of IT security. A word to the wise for anyone who’s planning on creating an online contest, particularly one encouraging university students (who have time on their hands and a licence to prank) to vote on stuff.

Ciao,
Bob.