Social Media in Crisis Events Open Networks and Collaboration supporting Disaster Response and Recovery (original) (raw)
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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.
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.
The Influential Use of Social Media Strategies in Crises and Disasters
Research Gate, 2019
Social media made radical changes and qualitative effects by its various tools and platforms, which enabled it to change the features of the crisis management media scene How can these social platforms be used effectively in times of crises and be integrated with crisis management communication strategy? What is the nature of this use? What are the consequent benefits to users of the various official and popular levels?
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.
ICT infrastructure and social media tools usage in disaster/crisis management
2015
This article explores the ICT infrastructure enabling social media usage for disaster management. In the era of pervasive social media, the study seeks to probe the usage of social media tools and functionalities in times of disasters. The study deploys Grounded Theory approach. Extending on disaster management cycle, this study examines the various source of information in social media followed by the type of information disseminated by them and additionally the most extensively used form of information. Three recent catastrophic events in disaster-prone Asia Pacific region were selected, Kashmir floods (September 2014), Indonesia landslide (December 2014), and Cyclone Pam (March 2015). Twitter was deployed for data collection under two phases, immediately aftermath of the event and a random sample from the first 5 days of the event. These two data sets examined the research questions by presenting timely and panoramic dimensions. The study is novel since it extends the literature ...