Social Media in Emergency Management: Examples from the Field

Abstract

In recent years, social media has empowered emergency and disaster managers, communities, and organizations to improve their ability to build disasterresilient communities, protecting them from the harm caused by all forms of hazards-natural, technological, and human-caused. By building upon these toolsets, officials and community leaders (formal and informal) are sharing and better utilizing critical information from partners and the community to perform more effectively to meet the disaster mission. The use of social media in emergency management is forcing a fundamental paradigm shift in government, building linkages, creating relationships, and moving data in real time, facilitating greater effectiveness and efficiency. Public and private sector players are working together in new, unexpected ways to integrate collaborative business solutions into what was traditionally the government’s resilience mission; short-term housing and hostel intermediary Airbnb has partnered with the City of San Francisco to provide emergency housing following a crisis (see, for example, http://blog.seattlepi.com/techchron/2014/07/29/airbnb-partners-with-s-f-for-emergency-response-plan. Social media is also driving change in unexpected areas, such as the “sharing economy” movement, which allows owners of equipment and resources to loan them to other individuals when they are not being used (see, for example, www.sunset. com/home/sharing-economy). Many key disaster events over recent years have driven home the unique value of using social media tools before, during, and after emergencies. One of the first events that drew awareness to the power of mobile technologies was the 2007 Virginia Tech campus shooting. When a senior student killed 32 people and injured 17 more, university students, family members, and communities related to the school used social media such as Twitter and Facebook to communicate details of the shootings to each other, while only generic information was being published by popular media (see http://sites.duke.edu/socialmedia coverage/personal-impact/2007-virginia-tech-massacre). During the 2010 earthquake response in Haiti, a group of volunteers used Ushahidi, the free and open source mapping technology, to collect, process, and map the most urgent tweets with geotagged location data to find survivors buried in rubble. Ushahidi (the Swahili word meaning testimony), originally developed to report the 2008 post-election violence in Kenya, uses a variety ofsources, including SMS (text messages), Twitter, and radio. The Haiti response demonstrated how social technologies, the use of offsite volunteers, and maps that visualized collected data offered a new and innovative approach to support the daunting response and recovery tasks faced by first responders and emergency managers (see http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/02/crisismapping-haiti). Internationally, emergency management practitioners and researchers took notice. When Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast in October 2012, Morris County, New Jersey, already proactively engaged with social media, aggressively ramped up their efforts before, during, and after the storm. Local officials used an integrated platform strategy. According to Carol Prochazka Spencer, the digital social media manager at the time, the county focused on utilizing their Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and website to push out information, as well as monitor and interact with their community members. They reached out and engaged the business community before the storm hit and during the storm, and used information provided by sources outside their government agency, particularly concerned community members. Their analytics proved their strategy successful. The county’s “MCUrgent” Facebook page following increased by 138% (of which 50% of the likes were from mobile devices) and Twitter followers increased by 66%. Key takeaway lessons included using photos when possible, responding to posts, having backup team members with multiple people trained to handle the social feeds, and keeping their “online voice” consistent. Their online response resulted in building a new level of trust with their community and increasing future opportunities for enhanced dialogue and relationships.