Did you feel it? Did your desk shake? Were your windows rattling? On Tuesday an earthquake rattled more than a few desks and nerves through-out the eastern United States and Canada. For some the earthquake was very real with desks moving and buildings shaking. For others, the first they learned of the earthquake was on Twitter and Facebook.

That's right - people were learning of the earthquake on social media before it hit the traditional news media channels of television, radio and the newspaper. Times have certainly changed. It seemed almost immediately the earthquake was a trending topic on Twitter and the hashtag #earthquake was added to every other Tweet.

So what does this mean to you? Disaster communication really has gone social. More and more people from all demographics and locations are hooked into Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr and blogs getting instant updates and notifications sent to their iPhones, iPads, smart phones and android devices.

To truly be in the know, you have to be connected. Connected to your team and connected to the world. When considering how you can use social media at times of crisis, it is really vital that you have a plan and a strategy. Now, not to boast too much bue we'd like to think our jointly hosted webinar with the Disaster Recovery Journal on Wednesday (one day after the earthquake) titled Social Media: What Is Your Strategy? was pretty darn timely.

In this webinar Regina Phelps adn Abbas Haider Ali discussed the importance of having a social media strategy to enable you to react in times of crisis and threat. We won't rehash the entire webinar here, but if you missed, use this link to download and watch the webinar (it's free).

So in the space of two days we have an earthquake that is communicated over social media and we have a webinar about using social media in times of crisis communication. You'd think that would be enough to emphasize how vital and integral social media communication is for business, personal and news communication.

But we can't help but direct your attention to the eastern coast of the United States - yes Hurricane Irene. A quick search of Twitter reveals that the hashtag #Irene has quite literally taken over the social media channel.

Major news outlets from the New York Times to Time magazine and the Weather Channel are tweeting about Irene's progress. Twitter feeds such as the HomeDepot are posting 140 character messages about how to prepare for Hurricane Irene. A quick look at Twitter and Facebook this morning reveals that bottled water is flying off the shelves in New York City, people are cutting their vacations short, airports are being overwhelmed with anxious travellers, and people are filling up their cars with gas. And this doesn't include the videos you'll find on YouTube of images of Hurricane Irene's power.

Convinced yet? Lets face it, there is no hiding from the importance of social media when it comes to crisis and disaster communication. Yes there are even iPhone apps available to help companies communicate during crisis. In fact Apple Inc. announced this week that the new iOS 5 operating system will give users the option of receiving early earthquake alerts on their iPhones. This warning app connects directly into Japan's national earthquake warning system - such a notification can give people seconds or minutes to prepare for an earthquake.

And as we know - sometimes all it takes is a few seconds to make a difference in crisis communications. So in light of the recent news and developments, there really is no excuse to not be connected, prepared, communicating and ready. Don't miss out on this key component of your crisis communication strategy - make social media a part of how you do business and protect your business.

(It is worth reading this article from Fast Company Magazine about the Red Cross position on social media communications during disaster and crisis - another example of how prevalent social media is in our well-being and response abilities.)

Update Post Hurricane Irene

Now that we've all had some time to recover from the effects of Hurricane Irene. Well, most of us - there are lots of you out there with flooded homes, washed out roads and no power... The one thing we've heard a lot about and read about is the poor media coverage. Yes, there was media coverage but rather than really providing us with information on how to be prepared, how to communicate, and what to do in the event of flooding and danger - the mainstream media really gave us hysteria. Televsion news clips, radio reports and newspaper stories telling and showing us the damage and really working up a level of hysteria. This is where social media shone through. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, people were able to get the real story about what was happening - it was from Twitter that most of us learned that Hurricane Irene had been downgraded to a Tropical Storm and that it was likely to cause less damage than predicted. Using Twitter and Facebook people were able to communicate with one another and get the news out quickly about road closures, dry and safe locations, and to communicate to others that they were safe. While the mainstream media was focused on footage and reports of disaster, social media came to the forefront providing actionable and useful information for those who wanted and needed more than sensational video footage.

There are lots of lessons to be learned from a disaster and threat such as Hurricane Irene. Particularly in terms of communication - consider how you used social media to communicate with your team, friends, and extended network. This was weekend was an excellent example of how vital social media is in communication and helping to ensure that the right message gets out. As this weekend shows - you need a social media strategy. (Do a search on Twitter today for #Irene and you'll see that people are still updating one another.)

Like geeks everywhere, I was riveted this week to Jeopardy watching the man vs. machine action as we hit an amazing AI milestone  –  demonstrating the ability of a computer to understand natural  language.  The results from the show speak for themselves with a  combined 2 game scores of scores were $77,147 for Watson, $24,000 for  Ken Jennings, and $21,600 for Brad Rutter.

There is of course bound to be some controversy like the issue of Watson having inhumanly fast reflexes when it comes to buzzing in to answer a  question, but you can’t help but be impressed with a run like the 2nd  night where Watson was an unstoppable clue-deciphering, Jeopardy  dominating machine.  Must be the Deep Blue Genes from IBM Research (punny enough?).

In the new world order of chess Grand Master humiliating, Genome  mapping, Jeopardy smack down capable computers, all we poor meatbags can  do is sit back and come up applications for these artificial savant  intellects.  IBM talked briefly about some of their ideas for the  Healthcare and Finance industries and I expect we’ll hear more over the  coming months.

I believe that this type of technology will become a significant part of the overall “relevance engine” revolution that’s just getting started.  It will take a combination of  machine natural language interpretation, real-time searching,  identifying who cares about interpreted/translated information, getting  it into the right hands, getting it there only when it’s needed, and  allowing people to interact with it however they are comfortable  (interactive voice, email, smartphones), to get us to a place where the  information technology augments and enhances our lives instead of  overwhelming it.

This post was written by a huge Jeopardy fan Abbas Haider Ali who wanted to give his thoughts on Watson. Want to read more about Watson find articles here.

Team behind IBM’s Watson computer

IBM’s Watson wins! First Jeopardy! — next, bad puns?

I ran across this hilarious webcomic and I thought it perfectly  captured the biggest challenges that my clients have when we’re  reviewing their incident and event management processes: Quickly  communicating outage related information out to all the various parties  that want it.

One of my client’s have used their xMatters (alarmpoint) engine  with great success to do this for every outage, do it automatically,  translate information based on target, and only send it to people who  really need to know.  Before going into details of how they do it with  their xMatters deployment, I’ll share some details about how they did it  before:

1. Network device goes down (switch, router, firewall, interface, …)
2. Event is noted by their NOC running HP NNMi
3. NOC techs determine which site is having the issue based on device name
4. NOC techs look up engineer on call using spreadsheets maintained by teams leads and hosted on SharePoint
5. NOC techs look up contact info for engineer and attempt to establish contact and confirm ownership
6. NOC techs look up their runbook to determine who else needs to know.   This could be any combination of stakeholders: IT managers, team  leads, project managers, application owners, site owners, and others
7. NOC techs write-up different emails for each constituent group and send emails via email distribution lists

There are lots of things wrong with the [simplified] process above.   The overall theme, however, is that there are lots of manual steps that  don’t really add value to the resolution process and certainly don’t  help rapidly communicate information out.  In fact, with most outages,  the stakeholders wouldn’t hear from the NOC for 30+ minutes and in the  meantime would have figured it out because someone else would tell  them.  And if the emails did get out quickly, they were shotgun  approaches to communication because the distribution lists kept getting  bigger every time someone would say “Why didn’t I know about _____?  Add  me the list so that it doesn’t happen again!”

Today, steps 1-5 are entirely automated to the point where the NOC techs don’t do anything at all because the xMatters (operations) engine does it for them and logs all the pertinent information in HP NNMi so that an audit trail is always available.  How?  Check out the video.

That isn’t, of course, the primary topic of this blog post (yes, it  took me a long time to get to my point).  The Geek and Poke comic  reminded me of what this client did to automate steps 6 and 7.  Instead  of the manual and broken approach that they had before, here’s what  happens:

• NOC techs set up managed subscriptions that link specific  individuals, with device types & sites (based on device naming  conventions), and roles
• When HP NNMi events come into the system, they are immediately relayed to the xMatters (alarmpoint) engine so that steps 1-5 to get a technician assigned and working on the issue happen as quickly as possible
• In parallel, the subscriptions match the event with the stakeholders  that need to know about the issue, determine their role, build out role  specific message content, and deliver it using the persons preferred  communication channel – email, voice call, SMS, etc.
• If someone wants to change what they want to know about, they log into the system and easily update their interests

Now that’s automation. Everyone wins – NOC techs can take on more  valuable tasks, field techs get alerted to issues more quickly,  escalations ensure that if someone is busy their backup can take over,  and all the stakeholders get to be in the know right away.

If you’re interested in learning more about this approach, or talking to this client yourself, reach out at info@xmatters.com or leave a comment.

Abbas Haider Ali.

Abbas Haider Ali, AVP of Sales Advisors here at xMatters is our guest blogger today.  Check out the five things that matter to him.

Like most people, what matters to me is always in flux.  It changes  with trends in technology, what projects I’m working on, what my clients  are up to, what season it is, and pretty much any other variable you  could think of.  The list below reflects literally what matters to me  right now as I write this post on Sunday, August 22, 2010 at 10:11pm  from the Westin Peachtree in Atlanta.

1. Technology: My iPhone 4.  Why?  Because I just did a  short walking tour of downtown Atlanta and took my wife along via  FaceTime + Sprint MiFi, checking into interesting spots on Foursquare,  and validating the supposedly good restaurants by checking Yelp reviews.   It really is the ultimate Swiss Army knife in my life and that’s  reflected by the apps that are on the 1st page of my iPhone.

   

2. Keeping Current: I like to keep up to date on lots  of stuff and like a lot of people I rely on various online sources of  information to do that.  I used to have a giant list of bookmarks and as  time permitted I would browse through content.  And then a while ago I  started using Google Reader and subscribed to RSS feeds for what I had  previously bookmarked.  That was good.  And then came the Reeder app for  both iPhone and iPad.  Now I consume way more information, do it far  more efficiently, and can easily share it with other people via Twitter,  Posterous, Facebook, etc.  That combined with some specialized long  form reading apps for the iPad like New York Times, NPR, and the BBC  round-up my information funnel.  I’ve been experimenting most recently  with the FlipBoard app as well but it’s mostly for random browsing.
3. Personal Goals: I tend to have fairly skewed  work/life balance so this tends to be a soft target for me but I am in  the process of signing up for a Level 1 language class.  Two choices –  Mandarin or Spanish.  It would take a whole post to outline my active  reasoning process behind the choice. If you have any particularly strong  opinions, feel free to share them as comments to this post.
4. Professional Goals: We’re about to enter September  which tends to be a very busy month as our clients come back from  vacations and all of a sudden projects pick up both in number and  urgency.  My biggest challenge them becomes a resource one.  Of all the  activities (some quick, some fairly involved) that my team could be  involved with, which ones should we focus in on with our clients?  It  feels like a global scale game of Tetris sometimes.
5. Random Thing That Matters: Getting my car to a  detailing place that can get rid of bird dropping stains using a clay  bar or some other super stain removal approach. It seems that the best  paint protection technology is no match for a Washington D.C. bird’s  diet + a little acid rain + high heat + strong sunshine.

Best,

Abbas