Social Media and Emergency Management

Implementing Social Media (SM) into Emergency Managment (EM) requires several things:

• You must convey trust, timeliness and transparency
• Your information must be reliable

SM is designed to provide emergency responders and the general public with updated relevant information about a situation. The public can respond in a number of ways. With SM technologies you can respond back quickly and provide damage control if needed.

EM is a busy, responsive field. Implementing SM can be time consuming. To manage your SM successfully use:

• Interns
• Free Workers
• Volunteers
• Students
• Paid Staff
• Empower your fans
  

Some examples of SM in our community:

• In San Francisco they use Twitter to release earthquake updates.
• FEMA has both a blog and Twitter
• ODOT uses Twitter to relay traffic updates
• Weather updates (in emergencies and daily)
• Terrorist attacks- citizen reporting

Citizen reporting in times of disaster has greatly increased with the blossoming of SM. The ease of information sharing has had a large impact on how emergency response agencies work with the public. Gone are the days when press releases were citizens only informational source. This new wave of reporting is here and agencies can decicde to get on board or be lost in the shuffle. SM provides a great way to have informal and do damage control more quickly in regards to rumors.


For more information about SM and EM join us for a 2 hour presentation 2.25.10. Contact lfoster@firstlink.org for more info.