D3 1 Usage Patterns Of Social Media In Emergencies (original) (raw)
Related papers
Using ICT & Social Media in Disasters: Opportunities & Risks for Government
Risk and Resilience Report, 2013
When a crisis is unfolding, people no longer wait for an official statement from government actors; rather they turn to the news media, they go to Twitter or Facebook, they log onto forums and blogs, etc., because they expect information and they can get it quickly from various sources. In such a dynamic information environment, if a government lacks a policy on how to use social media, particularly in crisis situations (meaning it does not act, or act appropriately), then it may face a loss of credibility and struggle with the management of a crisis. To get ahead of this curve, debating the risks and opportunities of using social media is a critical first step to building a sound social media policy and identifying certain engagement guidelines. This report examines four different issue areas to analyze how social media is used in the context of risk and crisis communication. These areas include: public safety and preparedness; emergency warnings, alerts and requests for assistance; recovery efforts; and, finally, monitoring and situational awareness. In the context of each of these areas, we highlight the key literature and real-life examples to explore the risks vs. opportunities in the utility of social media. These four areas capture the role of engagement and strategy in both the risk and crisis space.
International Conference on Information Systems Development (ISD), 2018
Learning and understanding what happened before, during, and after a crisis is extremely important for the improvement of the response process. For this purpose, social media has become an important communication medium used by both the affected persons and the emergency management services (EMSs). However, in different crises, different information may be needed, and the information shared in social media varies in its usefulness: It could be highly critical or completely irrelevant to the rescue operation. Supplying the best possible up-to-date information is crucial to the EMS, whose actions based on that information may save lives and resources. This paper studies a particular use case of extreme weather in Norway and identifies the information needs, the problem faced by EMSs, and how they use social media. It, further, pinpoints what different social media analysis platforms can provide in this type of crisis. The results of the research are criteria that social media analysis should follow to address EMSs' concerns. The output of this work can be used to more precisely describe social media communication for crises and to design more efficient platforms for information retrieval from social media.
Social Media and Emergency Services?
International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, 2015
Social media is much just used for private as well as business purposes, obviously, also during emergencies. Emergency services are often confronted with the amount of information from social media and might consider using them – or not using them. This article highlights the perception of emergency services on social media during emergencies. Within their European research project EMERGENT, the authors therefore conducted an interview study with emergency service staff (N=11) from seven European countries and eight different cities. Their results highlight the current and potential use of social media, the emergency service's participation in research on social media as well as current challenges, benefits and future plans.
The Transformative Power of Social Media on Emergency and Crisis Management
Advancements
There is a wind of transformation blowing across the world today. It is changing the face of emergency management and every field of human endeavor. It is called "social media". These days, social media is redefining crisis preparedness through the increasing participation of the masses in the creation and distribution of content in ways that surpass the capacity of the mass media and public authorities. Public-generated content has been found to be useful in all phases of preparedness. Unfortunately, most public safety authorities are still suspicious of using social media in engaging and disseminating information. This paper examines this new area of transformation that is having significant consequences on public safety and public life. As the scenario unfolds, emergency managers have a tough time choosing between the mass media and social media. Metaphorically, it is a race between a 'hippo' (mass media) and cheetah (social media).
CHAPTER 11: SOCIAL MEDIA AND EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
Chapter 11 of "CRITICAL ISSUES IN DISASTER SCIENCE AND MANAGEMENT: A Dialogue Between Researchers and Practitioners" reports on the challenges and opportunities made possible by social media in the field of emergency management. First, we consider the emergency practitioner and the challenges they face when using social media: difficulties in verifying social media data, liability risks, information overload, and a lack of resources to manage social media communications and data. To address these challenges, we propose the use of performance measures, standards, best practices, digital volunteers, training, and exercises. Attention then turns to the research around social media in times of crisis. This research investigates public activity (citizen reporting, community-oriented computing, and collective intelligence and distributed problem solving) and demonstrates how social media have shaped—and continue to shape—perceptions around how members of the public can participate in an emergency. We then look at research that studies emergency management organizations as they seek to understand how social media might be used in their practice. We conclude with descriptions of future research directions and next-generation tools for monitoring and extracting information from social media. Finally, we discuss the differences between practice and research perspectives and discuss how these differences can make it difficult to reach consensus regarding social media’s role in emergency response. We advocate that as practice and research work together expanding the research agenda, understanding roles, building relationships, considering organizational fit, and developing best practices, they will advance knowledge about the potential and realities of social media and move toward envisioning how social media may be used as a resource in emergency management.
Social Media in Emergency Situations
Twitter as a Social media tool is used widely both by the public and also by government agencies, however, a lot of information is not controlled so there remains doubt about correct information, particularly in emergency situations. The onus is on citizens themselves to perceive or interpret information as correct or not. First Responders are often present in disaster situations before emergency services arrive so they require a high level of situational awareness in order to increase accuracy. It is also important for the government agencies to gain the trust of the public so that official channels are used rather than putting people at risk in disaster situations.
Large-scale crises challenge the ability of public safety and security organisations to respond efficient and effectively. Meanwhile, citizens' adoption of mobile technology and rich social media services is dramatically changing the way crisis responses develop. Empowered by new communication media (smartphones, text messaging, internet-based applications and social media), citizens are the in situ first sensors. However, this entire social media arena is unchartered territory to most public safety and security organisations.
Nowadays, social media has blasted as an aspect of network communication. Since recent years people create and load content, share it, bookmark it and decide which gear is important which not. We create shortcuts and communicate via chats. We highlight the needed and delete the content we don't need anymore… With actions we do and life we bear there is progressively increasing crisis. As social media has much to do with crisis management, it has developed some characteristics to carry out crisis management operations. These are -collectivity; connectedness; completeness; clarity and collaboration. 1 In this work, there are presented different social media tools and the description of their utilization in the sphere of crisis management in order to increase rational, systematic and responsive competence in various organizations. The 4 main social media functions are discussed in this paper. (1) Information publication, (2) collapse plan and training, (3) collective problem solving and decision making, and (4) information accumulation. These are mapped onto the three phases of crisis management and present how a variety of civil media tools can be used to strengthen crisis communication. 2 There are several case studies and examples of organizations and governments included in our work.
Policy Issues Facing the Use of Social Networking Information During Times of Crisis
2010
The exchange of information during times of crisis/disaster has traditionally been the purview of public safety, the National Guard and other local, state or federal authorities. However, this model is undergoing a change with the availability of new mobile communications capabilities and the rise of social networking sites. The general public can now create and share information about crises as they unfold, and researchers have documented the timeliness and surprising accuracy of this information. As part of a large National Science Foundation funded project, researchers at the University of Colorado are developing tools to extract, organize and assess the flow of crisis related information as posted on social networking sites. With the promise of improved warning and coordination, such tools should help reduce the impacts of large-scale disruptions, including political crises, natural disasters, pandemics and terrorist threats. In this model, members of the public can obtain (and produce) information about an emergency that is specialized to their needs-as well as meta-information specialized for crisis situations-that helps them make judgments about the ever-growing amount of information. Such metainformation includes features of its source; judgments about the authoritativeness of the source; its concurrence (or not) with official sources; its timeliness (as the information may be better than official sources); other spatio-temporal features of the information's life; and anticipation of who would be looking for this information and why. Data mining and information extraction techniques have a critical place here, as does the creation of trust models and security techniques to offer privacy or possibly anonymity.