Issue 3

Your division chief didn’t speak in hashtag

Practical PIO analyzes real social media posts to help you improve your communications. All identifying details are blurred or removed because our goal is growth, not criticism.

You’re about to post about an incident, and quotations can be a powerful tool for connecting with your audience. Make the quotations count!

Full text

Here’s the full text so you can follow along (or in case the image doesn’t load):

✅ What works well

✅ The outcome is included. The release mentions that all residents were safely evacuated and a cat was rescued. This is what the public cares about most.

✅ The quick response (less than 3 minutes) is clearly stated.

✅ The 5Ws + H are covered. It covers who responded (#Your[Fire Department]), what happened (fire), when it occurred (though the time format is confusing—see below) and where it occurred (1000 block [Street name], why they were there (report of flames), and how they handled it (attacking the fire and searching for victims).

🛠️ What could be improved

Big picture

🛠️ Have a clear message. This release seems to be trying too hard to make too many points: the response was quick, firefighting is hard in this city, firefighters are amazing, and—oh yeah—nobody was hurt. Pick your main message (in this case: fast response and everyone was safe), lead with it, and let other details support it naturally.

🛠️ Use quotations strategically. The news media loves a good quotation, and your public can really connect with and remember something full of humanity. Here, the quotation is most of the release, and it’s inward-focused. Use quotations to reinforce important information and safety messages.

🛠️ Answer readers’ questions without creating new ones. How many residents were involved? Were pets lost? Meanwhile, the heavy focus on how difficult the job was and “[City] building construction” can make readers wonder: Is there a controversy here? What aren’t they telling me? Keep your message clear and outward-focused to avoid confusion.

🛠️ Write for your audience, not for yourself. When your release focuses on internal pride (“Herculean feat,” praising the department multiple times), readers can sense it’s not really written for them. Keep your message outward-focused on what the public needs to know.

Nitty gritty

🛠️ Follow Associated Press Style for times and dates. Instead of “1657 11/7/2025,” write “4:57 p.m. on Nov. 7, 2025” in the text of the release. The 24-hour time format is confusing for the public. To be honest, for the longest time, I thought 1657 was the box alarm number.

🛠️ Hold off on the hashtags. In most social media platforms, hashtags are nowhere near as useful as they used to be, so you probably don’t need them. This particular example was on Facebook, where hashtags never really caught on. Also, the hashtag is used three times when once would suffice, and they are all inside the quotation. Surely, the division chief didn’t speak in hashtag.

🛠️ Use plain language. Phrases like “aggressive, offensive, interior attack,” “achieve knock down” and “seat of the fire” are fire service jargon that civilians won’t understand. Say “entered the building to fight the fire inside” or “put out the fire” instead.

🛠️ Use proper punctuation. The two-word modifiers in this release should be hyphenated: old-school, hard-nosed. Not all two-word modifiers should be hyphenated, so see the Associated Press Stylebook for guidance. Also, “aggressive, offensive, interior attack” is comma heavy. It’s probably OK with no commas.

🛠️ Use proper grammar. The last sentence is what’s known as a comma splice. Three independent ideas—that could each be a sentence—were joined by commas without any type of connecting word like and. There are a number of ways to avoid this, but the simplest would be to make each idea a sentence beginning with a capital letter and ending with a period.

Practical PIO version

Here’s a version that repackages the incident information in more of a news release style that would be useful to citizens and news media. It’s more chronological than I often would write, but I think it works OK in this case. If you put the “no injuries” piece at the very beginning, even better!

Notice that I’ve added a line about the ongoing investigation. Even if you don’t have answers yet, you show transparency and head off speculation by acknowledging that the cause is being looked into.

What would you have done differently? Hit reply and let me know—I read every email.

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