Emergency Management 2.0
Civil emergency management is taking on a whole new life with social media networks. Various stories have cropped up about how news of the plane landing on the Hudson River, a Turkish Airlines crash, and other breaking news, were first spread on Twitter. Increasingly, state and local governmental departments are turning to Twitter, Facebook, and other social media tools to share news and service updates. A lot of people are using social media tools, and can easily be reached there. The Government Technology website reported in Emergency Managers and First Responders Use Twitter and Facebook to Update Communities that:
According to the research organization Compete.com, more than 300 million people visited Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Digg and Del.ici.ous in April 2009. The company only counted each visitor once in spite of repeat visits to the same site within the month.
Further breakdown indicates that:
104.1 million visited Facebook;
77.8 million visited YouTube;
55.6 million visited MySpace;
37.8 million visited Digg;
25.9 million visited Flickr;
19.4 million visited Twitter; and
520,000 visited Del.icio.us
Goverment departments take different approaches to public communications. The Los Angeles Fire Department, for example:
The LAFD doesn’t restrict its forays into social media to Twitter. The department has distributed video on YouTube, a video sharing site; posts updates on networking site Facebook, allowing users to share photos, videos, instant messages and other information with others over personalized networks; has a page on MySpace, another social networking site; uploads images of firefighters in action to image and video hosting site Flickr; bookmarks press releases, announcements and other communications on Del.icio.us, a site where people organize and categorize links; and belongs to Digg, a site for members to submit content that other members can rate in importance and comment upon.
The article continues:
Federal heavyweights like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have Twitter accounts, but not specifically for emergency alerts. FEMA tweets news items like disaster recovery center relocations and closings, and the CDC tweets about press releases as well as breaking updates like the latest number of reported swine flu cases.
As for interacting with the public in an emergency, there’s nothing as efficient as crowd sourcing a problem. For example, following the 2007 shooting at Virginia Polytech,
“[People on Facebook] were able to identify the names of all the people who were killed before the officials released the names…”
The researchers followed discussion threads on the walls of various Facebook groups, and reprinted some of the posts from the “I’m ok at VT” group. On the day of the shooting, group members posted messages disclosing the names of victims, which posters discovered via their own knowledge or from other Facebook sites. The researchers used victims’ initials instead of their real names and gave pseudonyms to discussion participants. The report concluded that social media participants operated out of respect for the dead and traumatized, and produced accurate finding, not rumor-mongering.
Local, State and Federal governmental agencies are learning that it’s not only possible to work effectively with the public using social media, in some cases it can be very helpful. After all, it’s about the people.