Active Shooter. Worst Day Ever.

I have no idea how to start this except to say my mind is a jumble. First, the human side. The victim is my son's age. The shooter just a couple years older. I have a parental compassion for both families. I can't begin to imagine the long journey from their homes yesterday to the institutions that require their immediate attention today - a funeral home and a courthouse. Prayers to all, their loss' are incalculable.

Answers or solace or understanding are just vapors, quickly glimpsed in the mind's eye then gone just as quickly. No one has an answer. And that is the very real hell of it. 

I'm going to talk shop now. Not callous or dismissive of the human factor, but I can actually see paths and actions that are important. Every public safety officer and administrator I've heard speak praised communication as one thing that went right. 

Where the shooting occurred is in a very student-heavy section on one boundary of campus. Panic would have driven thousands of people into pinch-points and "blind alleys" that could have been dangerous in their own right. So what went right? Social media. 

Facebook - hey, it's where moms and dads are now - did about 175,000 total reach under an hour. Only two official posts in that time. Mostly expressions of support, prayers, well-wishes. Very few inappropriate or odd posts. What were the outliers? Someone wanted to know the nationality of the victim - I believe this was a foreign national seeking reassurance that their friend or countryman was safe.

A few people commented on bad links on the homepage. The homepage is where I want to talk with you now. There were issues where none should have been. We talked about a plan, we went through the steps of our plan. There were mis-steps.

First, make your emergency web (your "active shooter" scenario) a one-click from anywhere solution. Don't pin it to having someone in a certain spot in a certain building. We kind of did this and it slowed us down. You should have an emergency page so simple and available that it can be customized and called from a mobile device. Dirt simple, no design. This is a facts-save-lives scenario. To hell with bells and whistles.

Second, your server is going to get pounded in a way it never has. Ever. The damn things start rocking back and forth, smoke spewing from the fans, there is so much traffic. The hand-off between your daily production server and your emergency message server needs to be rehearsed and tested again and again. 

The alert went into the regular "News" cue.
Should have become the entire homepage.

For reasons I don't yet understand (not a server or bandwidth guy), we put the emergency update on our homepage but it was many, many minutes (20? 30? more?) until it was loading as the homepage - which is what we needed to have happen. Immediately.

The information was on the homepage before the emergency page loaded, but it was buried in the bottom of the page under the "news" ticker (right). Active shooters and other disasters do not go in the text rows on the bottom of a homepage. 

People from my group, the server team and public safety will meet in the coming days and assess performance. This will be the most significant thing my group has to address. And we will do better. And we want you to do better. Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.

Analytics show over one-million pageviews for the 24 hour period. The event didn't occur until after 12 hours had already passed. These were mom's and dad's trying to figure out what was happening. News media trying to get the right information. Students and staff trying to ensure they are doing the things that the public safety officials want them to do. These people need immediate information. 

The homepage became the newsfeed

Dribs and drabs is fine. But it needs to be accessible. Schedule a meeting with your server staff today and talk this out. It's going to be worse than you think. Prepare for it. No excuses now.

I haven't even begun to scope the twitter traffic. On #purdue, it was moving faster than I recall seeing traffic fly when Steve Jobs passed away. Probably not that sustained, but it was simply a blurry column in continuous motion on tweetdeck. It was mostly user-generated, some public safety and a few "official" university tweets.

The twitter waters were running deep and fast. As the day went on and the pace changed twitter became a great platform for the news conference coverage, the coordination of a vigil and a place to talk about support services available on campus.

Third, have your graphics ready. Our facebook page at the beginning of the day had a bright "Winter Wonderland" banner. Nice, but not appropriate. Since you don't know what the event or tragedy will be  until it happens, you need to have generic, university-branded drab banners ready to go. Not a big thing, but all part of responding appropriately.

What else can I tell you? Hmm. You will be more distracted than you think. You will consider friends around campus and wonder about their safety. You will be voyeuristic, trying to find pics, or quotes that help orient you. I'm about 4 blocks from yesterday's shooting. I had friends in the building next to it sending me pics so I could comprehend the scale of the police response.

You will contact your family. Family and friends will contact you. My phone, email, twitter and FB were all busy all day. These people are important. Most of them understood when I said, "So glad you called, I am fine. It is very busy here right now but I appreciate your call and I'm looking forward to talking with you very soon. Bye".

Your office mates will want to talk. Babble in some cases. There will be political, moral and legislative debates. I saw people getting red-faced yesterday in, what should have been, quiet conversations to simply share views and emotions.

Our job now is to navigate back to normal. We will dance nervously when we take the vigil banner off Facebook and go to our next seasonal banner. What do we put on the homepage and how long does it last? It's a conversation. It will be listening and talking via our social media. It will be listening to advising and student affairs and administration.

Work is the easy part. Understanding what has happened, considering the human condition that lead a student to such a state of desperation that murder was the only avenue he saw- 

i have no idea.

42. My new favorite number.

So this is me happy. My team has scored a really big win. We delivered a 42% increase in a key customer demographic. Forty-fricken-two-percent. It feels good no matter how many times I say it. 42%.

So why is this project different? Why did it yield great results? The client was smart enough to let the team do great things. The color, the design, the grammar - none of these things hit the mark with the client. But these things all connected with the audience.

Smart client. Had to argue with "higher ups". Had to argue against the norms and in favor of success.

The copy writer interviewed audience demographics. The photographer took time to get to know the audience models featured. The designer dug deep into their mindset. Content strategist took away clutter. Project managers documented practices and ideas.

We worked as a team. The site launched, decent numbers, but we met right away and went through the numbers live in google analytics. We did a pre-mortem (thanks Guy Kawasaki) and found small things that, if ignored, would be the fails. And we all worked together to resolve and re-test.

Contrast this to clients who don't like this color, or that line or - we've all had someone ask us to make the logo bigger.

My job now is to exploit this win (along with a couple other recent projects). If I don't pull and present meaningful metrics then it is my fault the next time a client shouts me down. If our group doesn't take the time to meet and talk about high's and low's in retrospect - and then tie those experiences to data, then we are the blind squirrel that found a nut.

See, winning doesn't happen when you get lucky. Winning (and I mean on the client's behalf, because if they don't succeed, neither do we) happens before the project. It is knowing and understanding what works and what doesn't.

Winning is practicing pitching in your car on the way home. It's conversations with peers. It's finding geniuses (thanks Halvorson and McGrane for always answering) who are big enough to share knowledge. It's listening to clients complain about their project that fell short - listen to that more intently than any praise you receive. Mistakes are the easiest way to learn because they are always nearby.

In short, today was good. Tomorrow shows promise, but only if we examine, obsess and discuss each component of every success and every failure. And everyone should read Weinshenk's "Neuro Web", it's fun and informative.

What I mean is - It's All About Us.

Founded on July 1, 2010, the College of _____________________ brings together teaching, research and engagement programs dedicated to informing people's behavioral choices, improving their health, and enhancing their quality of life.

We are a young and vibrant college with a strategic advantage of being the academic home to scholars in both the human sciences and health sciences. Together, we aspire to a reputation for excellence in our research, in how we teach and prepare students for the future, and in the ways in which we serve our communities.

Wow.

The first thing you want to tell a prospective student (customer) is the date you were founded. Why?

You bring together teaching, research and engagement programs... and you want to inform people's behavioral choices... Do you teach students? Do you want me to enroll?

You want to improve "their" health - who are they? - and enhance "their" quality of life. Hmm. Why am I here? Do you have anything I can study?

This page isn't headed "Mission" or "About Us", but it's no more useful. And if your site's main page is labeled "Mission" or "About Us", then the first line of copy should read "we simply don't care about you, our customer, your needs or our long-term success".

Paragraph two.

You are a young and vibrant college. But I can already see that you don't care about me by the ambiguous, self-centric copy. Plus, your site doesn't work on my phone, so you can't be that young or vibrant.

And you have a strategic advantage of being the academic home to scholars in human and health sciences. Why do I care? Do I get to work with them? Study under them? Are they my prof's? What?

The last sentence is just a mouthful of empty calories that says nothing.

In an era when every university is only a click away it is simply inexcusable to present content that does not relate directly to the needs of the reader. Stop with the idea that more words and syllables make people think you are a better institution.

You know what makes a great institution that I want to be part of? A place that wants me to learn much and do great things with my life.

I came to your site. I have an opinion of you. I have my perception. I need you to validate my perception and direct me into your organization. I need you to lead me through the steps. I need you to show me that you can help me be successful.

Make that your opening paragraph.

And it's not a refrigerator.

So this is my first blog. And it's a complaint.

The web is not an experiment. It's not a fad or some whimsical vehicle for personal expressions. It's the most significant tool in the history of communication since writing. The web does everything, goes everywhere and is finding new ways to do new stuff that we hadn't imagined even a few months ago.

If you are a client - someone who needs and relies on a website, but doesn't build them as a profession - I beg you, hire a professional and let them work. Your website stinks because you think you're good at it. But you're not.

You wouldn't question your plumber's choice of PVC or brass. You don't know the first thing about plumbing.

You don't tell the chef to cook the salad medium-well and serve the steak first. With a lite vinaigrette. That would be crazy.

But you don't hesitate to tell your web team to cram too many links in your navigation. You gladly explain that your 17 year-old nephew, who is quite sharp at technology, thinks we should use more CSS3. Or that your "About Us" section should be first in the menu.

Stop. Please stop.

There are a few big ideas you must consider.

First, your website needs to do something to make you successful. If your site is an e-commerce arm of your business, your site needs to sell product. If you are a university, your site needs to get students to visit and enroll. If you are a hospital or physician practice, your site needs to bring patients to you.

The members of your _____ committee receiving a commendation from the local _____ society doesn't help. It doesn't make you more successful. It alienates your customer. It is one more thing that frustrates your customer.

Your website isn't your mom's refrigerator door. You don't get to hang every picture, announcement and accomplishment on it just because you can.

Every word and every image on your site needs to be justified by answering this question; "will it make me/us more successful by allowing our customers to interact with us?" If yes, post away. If no, throw away.

It really is that simple, but no one (that I've found, anyway) talks to you in these terms. I love the web. I love clients and I love the success you can achieve. And I love the fact that you've read this. Now tell me what you think.