by guest blogger Jamie Holter

I love snow storms in Puget Sound.

Food Supply in the EOC

I love being in the stinky Emergency Operations Center in Shoreline with a flat of Costco muffins, Pirate Booty and satsumas.

Charlies Angels radio in the EOC

I love watching four news channels over different parts of the snow storm. Our maintenance crews planning their attack on snowy and icy roads, overheard on the
world’s oldest Charlie’s Angels two-way radio.  I love taking calls from staff reporting for duty who say, “When do you need me, just let me know.” 

Monitoring television coverage

Our Emergency Operations Center had been active since Saturday.  A storm manager on with King County, the National Weather Service and doing interviews; a traffic engineer tracking cameras and collisions, another person who’s tracking collisions just involving buses and large trucks . Those vehicles that cause the biggest problems.  Everyone is at the top of their game, except for the moments when they are mugging for the camera.

The traffic management center, the nerve center for operations in Puget Sound, has more staff tracking traffic, putting up information on overhead signs, talking with crews in the field and dispatching teams to trees down, icy spots on the roads or helping State Patrol.

Staff Monitoring Twitter

Then, of course, the public information corner: the kings of @wsdot_traffic. Their clever and informative tweets retweeted to thousands…when they aren’t putting together videos and taking pictures of our workers. They tell me they love their job. I know they do.

Snow and ice is always scary and I’m proud that my job involves helping people stay on top of road and weather conditions even if we’re just stuck in a building and not on the roads like our Highway Heroes who do the heavy lifting. The folks I work with are top-notch, dedicated public servants. We can’t make Mother Nature change course, but we are here to help you get where you

Crews on roadway

need to go when she’s busy breaking Seattle snow records.

Measuring communication is one of the more difficult things about this business. Experts have debated for years the science of measurement for public relations and public involvement. Especially in a non-profit/government context, which is not tied to a distinct bottomline, defining success by the numbers is a tremendous challenge.

This year, the WSDOT communications team decided to ask our blog readers, Facebook friends, Twitterati and other on-line contacts to give us some feedback. The results were very interesting and for us, very valuable. In November we sent out a link to an online survey to more than 65,000 e-mail addresses that are part of our GovDelivery listserv databases, and we also posted the link on Twitter and on this blog. Within a few hours we had thousands of responses.

The results of that survey have been incorporated into our 2009 communications annual report (pdf 1.8 mb). We know this was not a scientific sampling. But the feedback was tremendously helpful in identifying areas in which we can improve.

Please take a moment to look through our annual report. We have organized the report to explain our outputs - those things we published and sent to the public and the media - and the outcomes, which mostly is comprised of your survey feedback. Since this is the first annual report of this kind, we have considered many of these measures as baselines against which we will be able to chart progress in future years.

Perhaps the reason that measurement and return on investment has been so difficult for public relations and public involvement has to do with how much of our success is based on relationships. We value you as a reader, as a person who uses the transportation system. And, we look forward to continuing to serve you with creative, interesting and useful communication information in 2010 and beyond.