The Power and Peril of Running a Web Site During a Crisis

Virginia Tech Tragedy Illustrated Power and Peril of Running a University Web Site During a CrisisBy SCOTT CARLSONhttp://chronicle.com/daily/2007/07/2007072405n.htm  July 24, 2007More coverage: Links to all of The Chronicle's coverage of the shootings at Virginia Tech. BaltimorePeople connect to a college first and foremost through its Web site. In the midst of a tragedy, do you know where your Web designer is? Here at the eduWeb conference on Monday, Michael Dame, director of Web communications at Virginia Tech, gave a blow-by-blow account of how the university harnessed the Web to disseminate information following the mass shooting on its campus in April. Before starting work at Virginia Tech, in 2005, Mr. Dame had some experience dealing with crises. He was a former journalist who ran the Orlando Sentinel's Web site, and he helped cover the Central Florida tornadoes of 1998, the hurricane season of 2004, the crash of the space shuttle Columbia, and the September 11 terrorist attacks. But for him, the Virginia Tech shootings eclipsed them all. "You are going to be a little freaked out by the numbers on the Web traffic," he told a crowded room of college Web designers and marketers. Virginia Tech's site got up to 150,000 unique visitors per hour following the shootings. The Web servers transferred 432 gigabytes of data on the day of the shootings. On a normal day, the site transfers 15 gigabytes. About 35,000 people posted condolences on a forum on the site within the first 72 hours of the shootings. Virginia Tech staff members tried to monitor the submissions, but after about a dozen offensive messages slipped through, they decided to freeze the forum. Mr. Dame said that Virginia Tech officials sent out an e-mail alert about shootings in a dormitory at around 9:30 on the morning of the tragedy. At 9:45, one of his colleagues, who listened to a police scanner as a hobby, heard reports of more shootings, in Norris Hall. "We knew that something big was happening on campus," Mr. Dame said. His office immediately went into "crisis mode" and started preparing the Web site for heavy traffic. They had created a "lite" version of the Web site in the event of an emergency, and they quickly posted the slimmed-down edition, which included only essential information -- both for clarity and to ease demands on the servers. The communications office set up a "joint information center," where Virginia Tech staff members could meet with public-relations officers from law-enforcement and other organizations. Communications officers were assigned various beats. "When I got information from a person who was assigned to a beat, I knew that I was getting information that had been vetted," Mr. Dame said. Throughout the crisis, the communications staff dealt with various "distractions," Mr. Dame said. Family members of students would call to check in. Former colleagues in the news media would call to try to "localize" the story. And, Mr. Dame said, vendors "inundated" the staff with calls that offered variations on the pitch, "This never would have happened if you had purchased our product." At the end of the presentation, Mr. Dame got a standing ovation. In the crowd, there seemed to be general amazement that staff members at Virginia Tech had been able to organize and disseminate information as well as they did. One audience member was overheard saying: "On our campus, you ask who handles the Web site, and nobody knows." Abu Noaman, chief executive of Elliance, an e-marketing company, was also in the crowd. "It was really insightful for me that, under duress, you realize a Web site is truly the public face of an institution."