You may not get the budget or buy-in to create a real business continuity plan, but if you can’t get one, then a communication plan might just be the best return on investment for the time and cost.

It seems simple, but communications is the single most critical capability post disaster. If your customers don’t hear from you, they assume you’re either out of business, or at a minimum unlikely to keep near term commitments. As anyone calling a customer support center will tell you, the black hole of “not knowing” is worse than being told, “it might be another day.” With a timeline the customer can react and plan, without it, she is at the whim of her vendor, which is now making her look bad with her customers.

Setting up the plan

Lobby at Verizon office at 140 West Street, New York post-Sandy

• Have a phone line with regularly updated information for all employees, with a tree for updates, or information that might be critical to sub groups.
• Create a website that is used only for updates.Be sure to host your recovery site with a hoster who is out of your area.
• Get a conference line(s) that are available for teams to jump on whenever they need to discuss specific activities with other members of the recovery team.
• Provide a location for meetings with at least two backup alternatives in case the primary isn’t an option. This could be someone’s home, some rental space or a conference room at a local hotel.
• Distribute pagers and or satellite phones for a few key staff. This can be especially important if the cell systems have been impacted by the disaster.

The tools of the plan

Email: Create a mirror of your email environment with a third party (if you haven’t already outsourced it to Google or Microsoft, etc.). This mirror doesn’t have to have all the data, it just has to have key names, addresses, and distribution lists. Your email should appear to be coming from the same domain as your primary email, and it should have the following:

• Mirror email accounts for a team of leaders and functional team members that are tasked with responding after a disaster;
• Addresses for all your customer contacts;
• Addresses for your key suppliers; and
• Distribution lists for customers and employees.

It really isn’t hard to make the above happen. Your email admin can find a third-party provider and setup a mirror but inactive environment with regular synchronization of the required information. This mirror environment allows you at low cost to have a “known and trusted” communications tool up and active the minute your primary systems are down.

Phones: Like the email solution, you should have a backup voice service such as Centrex. This voice service will have all the same contact information that your email solution should have, plus more depending on special contact details for recovery teams and key suppliers, etc.

Social media: If you’ve been reading the news lately, you‘ve seen or heard information on the importance of your CEO participating in social media (Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Quora, etc). A website with blogs and or a dashboard with updates can also be very useful. After a disaster your ability to communicate updates and answer questions in real time from customers, analysts, partners etc. is a huge benefit. The more information you make available the more comfortable your community will be and the more patience they will show you during the recovery period.

Justifying the communications efforts

During the disaster and the recovery these efforts will let you tell the customer know what’s going on. You can provide comfort to concerned families, partners and employees. Simple messages indicating what you’re doing, what your update schedule will be and how company representatives can be reached are all key objectives of the communications effort.

Of course, each communication tool has its advantages and disadvantages. I don’t recommend social media as the primary communication solution in lieu of email and phones. You still need the ability to provide targeted information to your customers and partners that would go way beyond the hit and miss capabilities of social media. Each of the tools listed above have capabilities that make them more suited for certain types of communication requirements.

In the case of social media the updates are really general and meant to satisfy the casual observer, while also updating those who do follow your tweets, LinkedIn updates, and Facebook posts closely. However, you shouldn’t consider it a substitute for direct communication with customers/partners via phone or email.

While these efforts aren’t an alternative to a real business continuity effort, like a weight loss plan or cleaning out the garage, taking small but measurable steps is often the key to making “something” happen. Each of the objectives listed above are relatively inexpensive and very easy to explain or justify to your leadership. At a minimum it will demonstrate that you’re taking the lead on “doing something” rather than ignoring the issue and blaming corporate inertia. You’ll certainly be doing your company a huge favor by ensuring that they don’t appear to disappear from the face of the earth when a disaster occurs.

Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where is also president and founder. .He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10.

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Speaking at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference, Systrom explained how Hurricane Sandy was a huge moment for Instagram (by comparison, people tagged 85,000 photos with the most recent Super Bowl hashtag), where it became a focal point for people sharing their images of the storm.

“Sandy was a really interesting event for us,” he said. “People are taking their cell phones and capturing everything.”

Systrom said the storm illustrated for him the participatory nature of Instagram, that people weren’t just interested in looking at photos of Sandy, but actually participating in the news in real time.

“If nearly 1 million photos were tagged with Sandy, imagine how many were taken on the East Coast?” he said. “That’s a really interesting moment in U.S. history because you can look at events and see how it unfolds.”

Systrom said the recent addition of geotagging on Instagram added to people’s ability to share and track photos of the storm. He said the geotagging allowed people to find information during the storm.

“People were actually interested in Sandy in realtime.”

Systrom also commented on Twitter’s addition of photo filters, noting that he’s not worried about it taking from Instagram’s experience, since the company has a good relationship with Twitter and that having filters has become a ubiquitous feature.

“Instagram is a community, not a filters app,” he said.

Check out the rest of our GigaOM RoadMap 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below:

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The fun Europe trip

The good:

myTaxi (iOS/Android/Windows, free)

I was amazed when our Airbnb host told us about myTaxi, which lets passengers hail a nearby cab, book it and track its approach on their phones. (There’s now a web booking option, too.) You can pay through a credit card linked to the app, or with cash or a credit card in the cab. And you can save your favorite drivers, make advance bookings and request cabs with certain features like credit card machines or hybrid cars. Unlike Uber, myTaxi works with regular city cab drivers so you just pay a regular cab fare. It’s basically street-hailing made easier. MyTaxi operates primarily in 30 cities worldwide, most of them in Germany, and just entered the U.S. for the first time with its launch in Washington, DC. I’m eagerly awaiting its arrival in New York, though considering the difficulties Uber has faced here, that could be a long time coming.

Tripit (iOS/Android/Blackberry/Windows/web, free for basic version)

I forwarded all our travel plans and email confirmations — hotel reservations, flight details, etc. — to Tripit. The app makes a custom itinerary for you and keeps all your stuff in one place.

Google Maps (on iOS 5) + data roaming

Apple released iOS 6 a couple weeks before I left for Europe, and as the terrible reviews of Apple Maps rolled in, I chose not to upgrade so that I’d be able to keep the Google Maps iPhone app on our trip. I was so glad I did. On our first few days in Europe, I was insistent that I wouldn’t shell out for an international data plan — I decided I’d stick to Wi-Fi and downloaded a few offline map apps. But the offline maps I tried were clunky and hard to use. So I paid for a small roaming package and from then on, wherever we walked, we used Google Maps to guide us. It worked perfectly and was a total lifesaver when we got lost after a visit to a coffee shop in Amsterdam.

TripAdvisor (iOS/Android/Nokia/Windows/web, free)

Using Trip Advisor for international travel seems roughly as cool as using a Rick Steves guide. I wondered if we were missing out by not using some cool local source —  and it’s true that all of the recommendations we got from local folks (like our Airbnb hosts in Frankfurt) were great. Yet TripAdvisor surpassed my expectations. Before we left, I tested its restaurant recommendations for my own neighborhood in Manhattan and they were, indeed, some of my favorite local places to eat, not total tourist traps. Abroad, TripAdvisor continued to serve us well and didn’t steer us to any duds. We also found that it had many, many more reviews than Yelp, at least in the cities we visited.

The bad:

Lonely Planet Berlin & Amsterdam Travel Guide apps (iOS, $3.99)

Despite our good experience with TripAdvisor, I was also looking for a more traditional guidebook experience — we weren’t in any city for very long and wanted to get a good basic overview so we could decide what to do. So I bought Lonely Planet app guides to Berlin and Amsterdam. At $3.99 each, they were cheaper than print guidebooks and, I figured, would give us the highlights.

They were better than nothing. Rather than taking a print guidebook and enhancing it through technology, though, the app guides were much more frustrating than a handful of paper would have been. I expected that the guides I bought would correspond with the most recent print editions. Instead, they were out of date, referring to museums that would re-open in 2010 and once or twice steering us to restaurants that no longer existed. The maps included with the apps were outrageously bad, and in general, none of the things that a digital guidebook can actually do better than a print book — reader reviews, up-to-the-minute (or at least up-to-the-year) updates, GPS integration, etc. — were included.

The unplanned road trip

The good:

Priceline Negotiator (iOS/Android)

This app came in handy when we needed to find motels outside Savannah, Ga. (after our first day of driving) and Washington, D.C. (after our second day of driving). We weren’t looking for fun boutique-y features in cool neighborhoods, just clean places right off the highway. Priceline has tons of user reviews and aggregated “guest scores” even for boring chain motels like that, so we knew we should choose the Comfort Suites in Richmond Hill, Ga. ($70) over the Travelodge ($30, “it was nasty roaches”) down the street. And you can book hotels directly through the app. Priceline Negotiator also recently added “tonight-only” hotel deals to compete with the Hotel Tonight app.

One limitation: We needed a one-way car rental from Tampa to New York, but the app doesn’t support one-way trips, so we had to book the car through Priceline’s website.

MotionX GPS Drive (iOS, $0.99)

By the time our unplanned road trip rolled around, I’d upgraded to iOS 6. I kept hearing that Apple Maps is not terrible for drivers, so it should have worked for the journey from Florida to New York. Yet while Apple Maps had a lovely interface and turn-by-turn directions, it kept giving us different — and longer — routes than Google Maps’ mobile site (I compared the sets of directions from the passenger seat). We would have just used Google Maps’ mobile site, but it kept getting glitchy and wouldn’t toggle between a map and text directions without requiring me to retype our destination each time. So we turned to MotionX GPS Drive, which is $0.99 and then costs an additional $2.99 per month (or $9.99 per year) for real-time live voice guidance.

MotionX GPS Drive got us safely back to a drenched Manhattan. I realized that over the past three days, the biggest problem I’d had was a few glitches on a fancy smartphone, and I felt grateful. There’s not an app for that. Instead, I texted money to the Red Cross.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Danny Smythe

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The site has just launched and for now contains only a handful of photos, but this screenshot of photos submitted to Electiongrams by Georgia politicos gives you the basic idea:

The significance of Electionsgrams for NBC is that it gives the network another news tool for election night. But, on a broader level, the site also represents a new phase in citizen reporting.

It’s true that media outlets have long drawn on the voice of their viewers through Twitter or tools like CNN’s iReport. Electionsgrams, however, means that NBC and others can easily tap into photo-based reporting on an unprecedented scale. The flood of photos on the site provides a cheap and near-frictionless way for NBC to add color to its coverage and keep up with real time events.

According to Ryan Osborn, VP of Digital Innovation at NBC News, these new citizen submission tools are not a replacement for people on the ground but a “nice complement” to existing coverage.

Mass-scale photo reporting offers a new form of coverage but also creates new challenges for traditional news outlets: how to find the good stuff in the deluge of photos? And how to screen out the mischief-makers who will try to spam the system with ads, fake news or worse?

In the case of Electiongrams, NBC is relying on a start-up called Chute that provides back-end tools for large-scale photo management to brands and large media companies. Chute helps its clients pull in photos that people share through email or sites like Facebook, but also offers human and automated moderating tools.

According to CEO Ranvir Gujral, the Chute moderation tools are part of an enterprise solution for brands and big media companies that are trying to swim through the massive new stream of user photos flooding the internet.

A quick look at NBC’s Hurricane Sandy photo-sharing site, Stormgrams, shows the moderation is working – sort of. The state-by-state storm collages are largely free of ads but do contain a fair number of irrelevant pictures like this one:

This doesn’t mean NBC is on the wrong track, though. The company appears to recognize that sites Twitter and Instagram have come to influence major news events as much as any desk anchor or gumboot-wearing weatherman, and is responding appropriately.

NBC’s Ryan says sites like Electiongrams are part of a larger process in which news companies are using people-based platforms to news gather. “We use them as an early barometer,” he said, “and then the work for journalists begins.”

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Certainly, sharing data about where you can get food and gasoline, and optimizing traffic routes based on user-reported information can help the Sandy recovery effort run more smoothly. But there are many things in a post-distaster area that reside solely in the physical world and data analysis can’t replace infrastructure.

Gasoline shortages are one example. Gas stations are either running out of fuel or don’t have power to pump the fuel that they do have. Meanwhile, delivery of new fuel to places that need it isn’t going to happen if a debris-clogged port is blocking tankers, or roads are impassable.

The bigger issue here is that there is a mismatch between our online experiences and our expectations about how those experiences translate into the physical world. We’ve grown so accustomed to the relatively frictionless movement of bits that we forget that the physical distribution of goods can’t possibly keep up.

Sure, this may be a ‘no, duh’ kind of observation, but the expectations of many people in New York seem to be that with all of our technology and resources, the current aftermath is inexplicable. I’ve lived through hurricanes, and the aftermath of Sandy is exactly what happens when a major storm hits.

This mismatch between Internet expectations and the real world is found everywhere, not just in the wake of disasters. You see it in frustration during big nights in San Francisco when finding a cab or an Uber car is impossible. You see it in slow order fulfillment in online retailers whose viral launch success may have depleted their inventory.

Finding ways to bridge that divide between the real and digital worlds represent the next big opportunity in commerce, but expecting the real world to match the online world’s speeds and scalability is still a pipe dream.

I thought about this today when I got an email from the University of Illinois asking for people in New York to share traffic data via an app on a smartphone, for an experiment the university is doing on post-disaster traffic patterns. It’s a cool idea — think Root Metrics asking for data to measure cell phone network quality or Rick Smolan and his The Human Face of Big Data app.

But the reality of disasters is this: You lose power. Homes flood. Gas is in short supply. Sometimes water is undrinkable. Looting and violence occur. Technology can tell people if they should evacuate, help pre-stock supplies near the edge of the anticipated disaster zone, spread the word about relief efforts and help people connect after the disaster itself.

But it can’t replace fallen telephone poles and downed utility lines. It can’t get oil or food supplies to the center of the disaster zone quickly, and it can’t reconstruct physical infrastructure at online speeds.

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Take a look at a visualization of check-ins in Manhattan on the Saturday prior to the storm and on Wednesday Oct. 31, days after Sandy hit. This really drives home how Sandy created two towns within Manhattan.

As you can tell, check-ins were way down all throughout the southern half of Manhattan, where flooding and power outages kept many businesses closed. The decline in check-ins may be partially a result of patchy cell phone service, since you need connectivity to check-in. But much of this was just due to the impacts of the storm on local venues. You can also imagine just how hard this has hit local merchants, who are used to getting a lot more traffic in their businesses.

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Fortunately, New Yorkers are looking out for each other as they always do. Outside bars and bodegas, merchants with generators are sharing them with residents who need to charge up and contact the outside world. This was the scene near Avenue A in the East Village where Percy’s Tavern set up tables with dozens of power outlets to use free of charge:

Similar scenes played out in front of hairdressers and coffee shops around the blacked out part of the city. Strangely, for this week at least, the cell phone habits of many New Yorkers resemble those of rural Africans who regularly pay small sums to charge their mobile devices from a generator.

The situation in Manhattan also highlights how, in a crisis, the city’s post-industrial economy still ultimately depends on very industrial fuels like diesel. (To see how we might one day progress beyond this, see the excellent reporting by Katie Fehrenbacher earlier this week.)

Finally, this scene on 2nd Avenue shows that water is also an issue for some New Yorkers in the black out zone:

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After an internal discussion on the topic provoked a stronger debate than usual amongst the GigaOM editorial team, we decided to post that discussion (typos, naughty language, and all) here to give you a sense of how we kick things around internally. We use Socialcast as our internal collaboration and discussion tool.

As usually happens with topics of this nature, Mathew Ingram kicked off the discussion by announcing that he planned to write a piece on the aftereffects of the outing of @ComfortablySmug. (That piece can be found here.)

That sparked a far more lively debate than usual for one of Mathew’s posts (among GigaOM folks, anyway). Roberts, a New Yorker with a more personal take on Tripathi’s behavior after relying on Twitter during the heart of the storm for vital information, piped up immediately, referencing the possible mistaken-identity case involving Amanda Todd and Anonymous:

The conversation evolved further: did Tripathi get what he deserved?

I couldn’t resist a joke about Mathew’s “self-cleaning oven” piece from earlier this week on Twitter and the spread of both misinformation and corrections. The “battle lines” began to form as we wondered how much guilt we could assign to Tripathi:

Executive Editor Ernie Sander weighed in at that point, opining that the world is the world, online or not, and that people who behave like jackasses in public shouldn’t be surprised to be singled out:

Mathew didn’t think it was quite that simple:

I urged people to think about the permanent ramifications that will be forever attached to Tripathi for doing something that, while quite stupid, wasn’t illegal and hasn’t been demonstrated to have caused actual harm to a single person:

Not everybody bought that line of thinking:

At this point, VP of Editorial Nicole Solis dropped some common sense:

And as he often does, Derrick Harris got the last definitive word:

Somehow I don’t think we’re done talking about this topic.

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(Note: This question led to some heated back-and-forth between GigaOM staffers in our internal editorial chat room, which is hosted on Socialcast, so for the first time we have posted a condensed version of that internal discussion online)

Just to recap, @ComfortablySmug posted a number of fake news items during the worst part of the storm on Monday night — including what appeared to be news bulletins about Con Edison shutting down power to all of New York and flooding at the New York Stock Exchange. The Twitter account was called out by a number of journalists and other users at the time for posting these fake reports, and then the following day the user behind the account was revealed in a BuzzFeed post to be Shashank Tripathi, a 29-year-old campaign manager for Republican congressional candidate Christopher Wight.

BREAKING: Confirmed flooding on NYSE. The trading floor is flooded under more than 3 feet of water.

—
  (@ComfortablySmug) October 30, 2012

Tripathi has since posted an apology, and appears to have removed a number of the offending tweets from his timeline. But his actions have clearly had repercussions that go beyond just public ridicule: it’s unclear just how much it has affected his livelihood, but he has resigned as Wight’s campaign manager, and a New York city council member is having discussions with the district attorney’s office about possibly charging Tripathi with a crime for the things he posted. “I hope the fact that I’m asking for criminal charges to be seriously considered will make him much less comfortable and much less smug,” Vallone said.

Did ComfortablySmug deserve to be outed?

In an email, BuzzFeed writer Jack Stuef said that he had no qualms about outing @ComfortablySmug because he was a public figure and his behavior warranted it:

“He was the campaign manager of a major party’s congressional candidate, so if there was going to be any question about outing an average citizen, the point was moot. He was working in the public sphere. Obviously it reflects very poorly on your campaign to have your campaign manager scaring people with willful lies in a crisis situation. And obviously the reason he thought he could get away with such behavior was because he had hidden his identity.” — Jack Stuef, BuzzFeed writer

Could Tripathi be charged and prosecuted for what he did? He definitely could, although — as my colleague Jeff Roberts noted — proving that he deliberately tried to incite panic is likely to be difficult, if not impossible. It’s not even clear that Tripathi was the original source for all of the fake news he posted, most of which I saw posted by others as well, including people who claimed to be watching a fire at the Coney Island Hospital. Should they all be identified and charged with a crime?

Everyone likes to use the “shouting fire in a crowded theater” analogy, but as lawyer Ken Paulson pointed out to Jeff, charging someone with a crime for a couple of tweets amid hundreds of thousands or even millions would be a difficult challenge given the First Amendment. And as a legal blogger noted during the recent furore over the “Innocence of Muslims” video — when the “fire” analogy was used by many as justification for censoring the video — this theory has often been just a cover for censorship, even by its most famous proponent, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The consensus when I asked this question on Twitter was that Tripathi deserved to be publicly shamed and his identity revealed because he had caused panic during a critical moment, when people were already afraid for their lives and their safety:

@mathewi Yeah, he did. Be a dick, get served.

—
Mike Isaac (@MikeIsaac) October 30, 2012

Does the punishment fit the alleged crime?

That would seem to qualify as shouting fire, but is Twitter really a crowded theater? And did the few tweets that Tripathi posted really cause panic? For someone whose family members were in the Coney Island Hospital, perhaps — but how many people who fit that criteria would have even seen his tweets? Another complicating factor is the role of Twitter itself: if it is already monitoring and blocking tweets for the German government and others, what responsibility does it bear for transmitting fake news that may be causing public panic? And what duty do other users who retweeted it have?

Sociologist Danah Boyd wrote recently about the unmasking of the Reddit troll known as Violentacrez for his behavior on the site, which consisted of posting and encouraging others to post photos of young women — and in some cases children — without their consent. As she describes in her piece, there are a host of questions raised by this phenomenon: Who decides whether someone should be publicly shamed or not? How do we respond when that impulse becomes a lynch mob, or identifies the wrong person, as happened with the alleged tormentor of bullying victim Amanda Todd?

“More often than not, those who use these tools do so when they feel they’re on the right side of justice. They’re either shining a spotlight to make a point or to shame someone into what they perceive to be socially acceptable behavior. But each act of outing has consequences for the people being outed, even if we do not like them or what they’ve done.”

The most popular response in the case of Tripathi is that he deserves everything he gets because he was “being a dick,” as more than one person described it. But does that still hold if he loses his job, or his family (assuming he has one) or is charged with a crime and becomes unemployable? What if he becomes depressed and jumps off a bridge? Pursuing and “doxxing” (i.e. forcibly revealing someone’s real identity) could be seen as a form of harassment and bullying itself — so when is that equivalent to or worse than the alleged offence that the anonymous person committed?

As Boyd points out, the more we become a networked society and live a large chunk of our lives online, the more we will run into these kinds of dilemmas. Each one becomes a kind of slippery-slope problem, where drawing the line between appropriate and inappropriate behavior becomes harder, and the risk of lynch-mob type activity becomes greater. And in some cases, the penalty could turn out to be severe.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/Andrea Michele Piacquadio

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