Saturday, February 26, 2011

Fun and Games, Not

128 emails - all arriving at once at 6:12 ct. Fortunately, we'd actually spent time during the day answering these complaints and requests to "fix RazorVision NOW.". Believe me, no one wanted to fix if more than me, but really, seriously, out of everyone's hands.

Call it a bit of a miracle that we got part of the day out live considering where we started.

Lot of people did some hard work to make it happen - and I thank every one of them.

A lot of fans were frustrated, and I appreciate them.

What? That some sort of turn the other cheek from Matthew move?

No, I'm glad we had people mad. Glad that we had people saying shut down the baseball video so we can see the track video. To forget fixing track and get up the baseball. Never, ever take passionate fans for granted. There are sports and times where the sound of crickets are deafening.

Plus, they taught me another important social media/public information officer/emergency communications lesson. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Keep it simple, keep it friendly and no matter how annoying the questions, they are the genuine concerned questions of passionate followers.

So by the 9th or 10th time I got the alert that "RazorVision is down" I just smiled, copied and pasted and resisted all temptation to say - have you not been reading the past 10 minutes of the live blog you idiot - because that is not helping them or me.

Patience. Follow your check downs. Have your crisis plans in place. And guess what, someday you will really, really use them.

And it may not be Armageddon, or a tornado, or an ice storm, or an earthquake. It just might be some mysterious mechanical error.

Did I mention you need plans? And the leadership to follow them?

Go find yours today. You just might need them tomorrow

2 comments:

pmarshwx said...

At least for me, the last tweet from @ArkRazorbacks mentioned that it was believed the baseball feed would be ready by game time. That was the last time I heard something until my tweet asking for an update. For all I knew, I was doing something wrong since it was my first day with RazorVision.

Maybe in the future some sort of announcement can be posted on the website?

Bill Smith said...

Thanks for the feedback Patrick, however, when we got into the depth of the crisis, it became apparent we didn't have all the details and we were fighting minute by minute to get the events up and live produce them.

Sorry I forgot to retweet, but we were up by the third inning.

Also, did you not see the press release that was posted on the website that detail what was going on? We had also tweeted that out as well.