By Christopher Tarantino
Standing in front of a room of close to 40 emergency management professionals (most of them twice my age with decades more experience than me), I am almost always asked how I arrived where I am today and how I created such a strong niche specialty at the age of 21.
It’s not an easy thing to explain—I don’t even have my degree yet, but here I stand, one of six instructors in the continental United States qualified to teach the very first FEMA-accredited, in-person social media course. I usually sum it all up in two words: tenacity and foresight.
To tell the truth, I never pictured myself as a firefighter, an emergency medical technician, a marketer, or—even less—a risk/crisis communicator. I still remember being asked if I “brought my permission slip” to one of the first FEMA trainings I attended in Anniston, AL, a few short years ago. I was barely 18 and was coming to terms with the fact that I would need to get used to being the youngest person in the room (often by a wide margin) if I was to truly succeed in the emergency management communications industry. I was a young marketer pitching the idea of community relations and social media to fire chiefs and emergency managers who had seen it all—my input and predictions about the future of emergency management communications were seldom welcome.
Emergency management personnel were burying their potential communities/supporters in long-winded, technical information and advisories and neglecting to see the value of interpersonal connections, social networking, and trust-/community-building. I saw the breakdown in communications and the subsequent gap in understanding between audience (the general public) and communicator (public safety, government, etc.) and had the foresight to embrace emerging technology to fill these voids. I needed to battle ageism and doubt-filled colleagues as well as create a solid idea of where I was going to fit within a niche that wasn’t even thought of yet. This adversity bred a tenacious attitude that grew in me like a hunger, and I worked harder than ever to blaze a trail for social media and marketing communications within the emergency management and public safety fields.
So why choose marketing as the vessel for all of this change leadership? Very simply, marketing provides the opportunity for widespread application of principles related to habit formation, adoption of technology and ideas, and basic communications. I chose it as the slate to write my future on and it’s been an interesting journey set at a staggering pace so far.
Tenacity and foresight can do much more than slingshot a career in the right direction, however; these principles can motivate cultural change within an organization and direct effort toward purposeful communication enabled by new technology.
The issues I observed in public safety communications are by no means unique to this industry—in fact, I’m positive that every organization has seen these issues in some capacity. Why? No matter how important your content may be, you will forever be at the mercy of your audiences’ attention span. We, as communicators, often forget this and get so caught up in content creation, channel selection, and cramming every piece of relevant information into a message possible that, once it is published, no one wants to read it! We start slinging technical jargon, pile on droves of boring information, neglect basic design elements, and finish with a final product that is hard to read, looks terrible, and reaches little more than deaf ears. This isn’t terrible when it’s just a simple blog post, but it is a recipe for disaster when crisis communications are involved. If you do not build your community now, you will be caught off-guard once there is a disaster and will always be playing catch-up. A marketing mindset can revolutionize the way you communicate technical information, and it has the power to create communities and drive action both before disaster strikes and well after.
Creating a marketing mindset within your organization is, admittedly, pretty difficult. It involves many long nights and an unwavering commitment to a better future (often with little promise of return on investment (ROI) in the foreseeable future). What’s more, it requires a steady resolve and perseverance in the face of adversity.
The first step is to listen and figure out where you and your organization’s strengths and weaknesses lie (using a SWOT analysis might help here) as they relate to compelling, marketable communications. From there you should develop a strong idea of where you need to be, begin to get buy-in from key players within your organization, and create a plan for getting there. Reaching this point is 80 percent of the battle. From here the recipe is relatively simple: leverage partnerships and develop a network of supporters, learn from those you wish to model your communications after, develop your “voice,” and build a community around it.
At the heart of almost every interaction we have on a personal or organizational level, we are always striving for adoption or “selling” our ideas. Being familiar with how marketers approach communications problems can assist with your own communications approach and impact how well your messages are received. For example, knowing and understanding how innovators or early adopters behave and embrace ideals differently from laggards (marketers call this “diffusion”) can help your ideas stick both within your team and when communicating on behalf of your organization. By embracing sales models like SPIN (explaining the Situation to your audience, identifying the Problem(s) and Implications of those problems inherent within the situation, and providing a Needs pay-off to your audience) or AIDA (grab your audience’s Attention, pique their Interest, create a Desire, and suggest Action), you can show value and catalyze a desire to act on your messages. There are many opportunities within your field to create content that is both relevant and compelling, you just have to find them, pair your message with the appropriate channels, and know your target audience (another marketing trick that’s much more difficult than it looks).
Set your target with foresight, be tenacious, have faith in your new approach, and always be open to learning and growing from your audience.
Christopher Tarantino is a soon-to-be graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology (with a BS in business administration and marketing) and is a “Social Media for Natural Disaster Response & Recover” instructor for the University of Hawaii’s National Disaster Preparedness Training Center. His specialty is in marketing, community relations, and emergency/risk communications. Follow him on Twitter @Tarantino4me.
