Before living in Colorado my family and I had lived in Arizona, and Las Vegas. Natural disasters were not something that really registered with us.
We should have been warned the day we moved to Colorado, as we drove down the I-70 in mid-November at eight o’clock at night to find six inches of snow piling happily up at the Eisenhower Tunnel – seemingly out of nowhere that we were no longer in the Southwest. In the car with us we had a lizard, three children and two dogs. We didn’t actually own heavy coats or snow boots. Cars slipped and slid all over the roads, as the snow was unrelenting.
The mom in me was rehearsing survival scenarios in my mind should we face the worst-case scenario of being stuck on the highway. With difficulty, I had made the difficult decision that I was willing to part with the lizard. (I was still mad at Santa Claus for that particular Christmas gift from three years prior).
Somehow, several hours later, we all made it down the mountain (even the lizard) and on to flat ground. I felt like the Universe had sent me a personal, “Welcome to Colorado!” card. (Although more than likely, the fine print of that card included somewhere the words, “You unprepared idiot.”
The same year, on an afternoon trip to the dump, (I was gutting the inside of the home we had bought), I found myself within a mile of a tornado. Until that moment, I didn’t actually know that Colorado had tornadoes. I discovered it when the radio began blaring emergency broadcast signals and giant pieces of hail began barraging my trash-filled car. Once again, the Universe smiled upon me and gave me a free pass, but I’m sure you can imagine that I was seriously, seriously shocked to discover this place I now called home was host to both blizzards and tornadoes
Although the weather here in Colorado really affected the honeymoon period of our relationship, I have to say I am more prepared than I once was. Every member of our family now owns snow boots and coats. We remember them almost all of the time. However, I began rethinking our preparedness strategies for emergency situations as I watched Hurricane Irene sweep across the Eastern Seaboard earlier this week.
My two minor weather incidents were enough to help me truly commiserate with the people who had experienced the storm and flooding, if only a bit. Like most people who watch catastrophe from afar, I spent a lot of time wondering how we should have/could have avoided the destruction and damage. Weather radios are, of course, a good investment, but how many people really have those? The emergency broadcast alerts are becoming more and more obsolete as fewer people listen to the radio or watch network television. Then it struck me, wouldn’t it be much easier to reach practically everyone in the country or area with a mass SMS text?
My wonderings lead me to the SouthFloridaSun-Sentinal.com, where I found that interested parties could opt-in to receive mobile message updates from the newspaper concerning weather, emergency updates, sports, local news, deals and even Lotto numbers. On the website consumers select their updates by clicking the boxes of interest to them, meaning that the consumer has total control of what updates, exactly, they will be receiving. The SouthFlorida Sun-Sentinal.com quite clearly states on its home page that those individuals opting-in would only receive 5 texts in a one-week period, clearly establishing boundaries between the consumers and the company.
I was really impressed to see that the local paper had seen their potential to tap into their resources and to use their credibility as a news source to update citizens in their area and to help keep them safe from any and all threats.
Providing this service offers the paper the opportunity to expand their credibility within the residents of the community. Customers who do receive updates via text message and through the SouthFloridaSun-Sentinal.com will forever look to them first as a trusted news source.
Of course the other opportunities to reach customers and to hook them on the SouthFloridaSun-Sentinal offers an extra bonus to the company. I’m certain that many customers come to the site to opt-in for safety updates, and click on other updates as well. In this way the company is continually building their relationship and establishing a feeling of trust with the customer.
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