Emergency

If you follow the Webster Universty Twitter account, you may have seen the following tweet come out on April Fools day:

When I saw this tweet I wondered briefly if it was an April Fools Joke.  Then, weighing the possible gravity of the situation I decided to RT it both under the InnoGage twitter account and my personal twitter as well.  I figured if it’s real, I could save lives - which to me is more important than looking foolish if turned out to be fake.   Fellow Tweeters, Ann and Joni Retweeted the message as well.

I am happy to report that:

1) the shooting incident did not occur and…

2) the Tweet was NOT an April Fools Joke

So, you ask…what the heck went wrong???  I was able to reach Patrick at Webster University, who controls the Webster twitter account, this morning and he walked me through the events from yesterday.

Here is the story:

Webster University takes campus security very seriously.  With over 100 campuses across the globe they have a lot of area to cover and students they are responsible for.   They have implemented an extensive Security Alert System that is able to notify thousands of people of dangerous situations in a moments notice through email, text messaging, phone…and now Twitter.

The problem happened when the Marketing group turned over the password for the Webster University twitter account to some folks who needed to test the feed into the twitter account for a specific campus.  Unfortunately the test went live and the message above was blasted out.  Adding fuel to the fire, the day was fatefully APRIL FOOLS DAY.  As soon as the owners of the twitter account realized what happened, they killed the test tweet message and began damage control by contacting those individuals who had retweeted their alert

So what can we learn from this experience?  There are 3 main takeaways:

1) TWITTER WORKS!  Within minutes, the information from the Webster twitter account hit an estimated 5,000 people and very possibly was posted (in real-time) to blogs and Facebook pages.  Had it not been April Fools Day, the Retweet rate would have likely been even higher.

2) If you are going to test anything related to emergency notifications or twitterfeeds…etc. use the word TEST in your message.  There is no reason to make up a fake emergency message to test an API or connection.

3) Finally, Never Never Never test anything on APRIL FOOLS DAY. 

(p.s. Brendan did a nice write up on the event also at Malleable Musings)

Tagged as: Alert, April Fools, Emergency, Fiasco, higher ed, Twitter, University, Webster, Webster University

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