September 5, 2005

Tony Danza? Melissa, it's time you quit that maternity leave and came back to work! Next Monday can't come soon enough! We've missed you.

So Obvious...So Overlooked

The most important part of communications is listening.

And that's what's so stunning, shocking, embarrassing, and heartbreaking about the government's response to the Katrina catastrophe.

They weren't listening.

They weren't listening when the Times Picayune wrote story after story about the need to strengthen the levees.

They weren't listening when it was crystal clear that Katrina was headed right for the Gulf Coast.

And they weren't listening when hundreds of thousands of people were hurting, Big Time.

Paula Zahn's interview with Michael Brown will live in infamy as - perhaps - the penultimate object lesson in "not listening."

Most of us cannot imagine ever being as insensitive and unresponsive as our government has been over the past week. But can we learn to sharpen our own listening skills in the worlds in which we operate?

One helpful "handbook" that I've always liked is Deborah Tannen's book You Just Don't Understand. She focuses on the different ways in which men and women communicate. We all occasionally fall into little traps of knee-jerk reactions that make us unresponsive to the person who is trying to communicate with us.

Our business is communications. So, we darn well need to keep working on our listening skills. Otherwise, we could end up with another kind of job...like working for a thoroughbred horse association, for example.

Getting Online in Crisis

The impact of the Internet was acutely felt during this past week. Michelle Evans shared some great statistics with me.

According to comScore Networks, on August 29th, more than 1.7 million searches were conducted containing the words "Hurricans" and/or "Katrina."

Traffic to RedCross.org on August 31 reached nearly one million people, more than 32 times the average number of daily visitors from August 22-26.

And then - on Wednesday, August 31st - according to Nielsen/NetRatings RedCross.org attracted more than 1.1 million people. That's more people than logged onto RedCross.org during the entire month of December (in response to the tsunami disaster)...and it's 10 times the normal traffic to the site.

Also on the 31st, CNN.com reported that there were 15.7 million video plays of its Hurricane Katrina coverage over the Monday-Tuesday period. By the next day, CNN had received more than 10,000 e-mails from citizen journalists.

Alas, very little word came from New Orleans. On an average day, 700,000 people used the Internet there. But, by last Tuesday, that number declined by 90%.

I just logged on to Amazon, and there's a big Red Cross appeal on their home page. Hopefully, many many websites are doing the same. My guess is that the people of this country will listen...even if the government doesn't.