Rapid Response Engagement

Referencing back to the CoSIDA presentation, here is a perfect example this past week of the marriage of monitoring and engagement. This is a real world, real name situation. In the course of the relaunch of our website, it has drawn new attention to all things Razorback. Two days ago, a moderator of the largest fan board made a post around 6:50 p.m. that a link on the Razorback Foundation pointed to a former coaches' now closed website. I picked it up while reading through boards around 7:30, and forwarded a note to those who needed to know. Within 30 minutes, one of the people commenting on the board took it direct to the AD.

In the past, a letter or even an email might linger. With the speed of the 'net, that's just not going to work. By 8:40, I'm emailing this person to thank him and assure him that we were making contact with the vendor to correct it. At just after 9 p.m., a segment of my email is quoted out on the board and after that the thread petered out with generally positive comments that the department was reacting to the error.

There are a host of the old lessons within this event:
Turn the speech into a conversation -- by listening and responding, we gained positive credit.
Digital assets are incredibly portable -- as I've always tutored our athletes, staff and coaches, anything digital -- in this case an email -- is very easy to cut and paste anywhere.
Rumors move at the speed of light -- no telling how this morphs if ignored, as it was heating up within a couple of hours.
Public schools are glass houses -- every email, every call, every detail is publicly available and subject to review.

Not 24 hours later, we had an all-blog event where one prominent statewide news blogger picks up just a part of a bit on one of the statewide radio shows. He riffs on what was said, and doesn't pick up until the next day that it was a practical joke played by one host on the other. But, the first part related to our football press guide, and it launched a thread on a pair of boards. Again, fast emails to the host and the board admins discovered the truth -- the fact it was a joke -- and that got posted on the boards. This effectively shuts down the thread, and the boards move on.

The lesson once again -- you must stay involved with all of your communities: physical and virtual.