A Disappointing Trend, Studied

Some of my work in the first responder world has landed me on a project building an application in the unfortunately ever-growing field of active shooter/threat research, due to the increasing number of events in the last 15 years.

A few articles recently have been interesting reads, so I figured they’d be worth a share:

If you’re in for a longer read, the FBI put together a more comprehensive study of active shooters between 2000 and 2013.

Hopefully all these studies and attention will help us find a path toward reducing and eventually eliminating these terrible incidents.

Value Your Customer's Time

It’s hard to maintain the attention of busy people. At the IAFC, we are asking the current and future leaders of fire and emergency services to take time out of their busy, hectic and often traumatic days to engage in order to make their jobs easier. It sounds as hard as it seems.

We can’t expect for each one to drop everything on their plate and take advantage of the resources we offer (webinars, white papers, SOPs, SOGs, best practices and thought leadership articles, to name a few). There are other ways to go about it.

The Daily Egg put together a resource we all can use to help with our busy audiences.

Automated emails work best for staff hour efficiency, but more importantly, for getting through to our audience, writing helpful, no fluff emails, texts and the like go a long way. Offer the things they can use immediately to improve their job. Forget the exclamation point laden emails(!!!) that are oh-so-familiar to every inbox. Treat every customer you encounter as if you’re speaking with a friend you want to help, but know their day as if they’re as hectic as a Nikki Minaj concert-goer on the front row.

Overall, treating people like you’d want to be treated is how best to handle any scenario, but especially yo this fighting every day to make the world a better place. We do it – and continue to improve daily – and you should too.

Improve Your Social Media Game

A few years back, I put together a social media strategy template to share with folks. Putting the strategy in action, I managed to triple my organization’s Facebook Likes during the past three years. I share the document with fire and emergency service departments and grant-funded projects at my organization looking to be more active in social media.

One of the best resources I found recently was put together by Buffer, a web app that is “working to make people’s lives easier on social media.” Throughout a single month, they shared a social media tip each day, and put them together into one big list at the end. It’s fantastic, and I can’t recommend it enough. Some of them seem obvious, but others provide web tools to help you do everything from creating animated GIFs from video to creating branded images with quotes on the fly, and learning more about your social media followers.

Take these resources and you’ll able to hit the ground running on the social media app of your choosing. Happy Tweeting/Facebooking/Pinning/Whatevs-ing!

Things I Read - March 29, 2015