It’s been 2 years.
I remember very clearly that day.
I only learned about the tragedy around 11AM that morning. I was unplugged to work on a project, and it’s just when I checked my email and the email listservs that I saw a message referring to something terrible going on at Virginia Tech. I checked VT website and decided to share the info and a screenshot with this blog’s readers right away.
There was no Twitter at that time, or more accurately it didn’t have the following it now has. I can’t stop thinking that if the microblogging platform had been around, maybe, some lives could have been saved.
The Virginia Tech Tragedy marked a day in American and higher ed history. That day, Mike Dame, Director of Web Communications at VT and his team wrote an important page in the higher ed web communication book. They literally wrote the manual to handle web communications in such a terrible crisis.
In the following day, they were criticized – as the institution was – mainly by mainstream media and experts for failing to communicate… But, at the end of the day, Mike and his team did a great work.
2 years ago, I kept track of the homepage changes on a post to compile an archive that could offer an account of the great work of Mike’s team.
When things settled down a bit, I told Mike that he should tell the community how things went and how his team handled them. I worked with Mike on a webinar (that allowed us to raise $4,300 for the Hokie Fund of Virginia Tech) that became a famous presentation given later that year at many higher ed conferences.
If you didn’t get a chance to watch that presentation yet, here’s your chance. Now that Mike has left higher education to work in healthcare, I think it’s time to release this presentation to our community for free.
From the Inside Out: Lessons Learned in Crisis Web Communications after the Virginia Tech Tragedy (69 minutes – recorded on July 10, 2007)
Michael Dame, Director of Web Communications at Virginia Tech, will provide an insider look and analysis of his institution’s Web communications after the tragedy, helping every institution understand what happened and prepare for the unthinkable and the unplanned.
Streaming file link
Downloading file link
You’ll need to use “hokie” as the password to get to these files and you might have to use Internet Explorer (sorry it’s an old file and Firefox doesn’t seem to play well with this version of WebEx recording)
You can also have a look at what I’ve written for the past 2 years about the VT Tragedy and the topic of crisis communication.
And, to honor the memory of the victims, why not tell us now what you’ve learned or have changed on your campus in terms of emergency notifications or security by posting a comment.