07
Mar
Social media in a time of need
The Red Cross and the Los Angeles Fire Department have been at the forefront of adopting social media in crisis response. That’s not entirely by choice, given that news of disasters has consistently broken first on Twitter. The challenge is for the men and women entrusted with coordinating response to identify signals in the noise.
Public expectations for those staff are high, as research released by the Red Cross on at the Emergency Social Data Summit last year showed. Nearly half of respondents ask for help on social media and 3 in 4 would expect help to arrive within the hour. “We’ve set up an expectation that, because we’re present in these spaces, we’re listening,” said Wendy Harman (@wharman), the Red Cross social media director, at a training conference in Tampa, Fla.
At present, those high expectations don’t always match up with the capabilities that first responders possess. That’s changing. First responders and crisis managers are using a growing suite of tools for gathering information and sharing crucial messages internally and with the public. Structured social data and geospatial mapping suggest one direction where these tools are evolving in the field. Prototype group-messaging platforms like Loqi.me point to ways they may evolve further this year.
Some tools, such as the Red Cross shelter web app and the Shelter View iOS app, allow the public to access information. “If we’re going to ask the public for help in a disaster, we need to give them tools,” said Trevor Riggen (@triggen), senior director at the Red Cross.
The Red Cross is working on building better filtering tools and mapping geotagged updates to help improve their situational awareness, said Riggen. By aggregating crisis data, visualization, and analysis into operations, they’re pressing the opportunity to see where issues are emerging and introducing more relevance into social streams. “One tweet doesn’t tell us to shift,” said Riggens. “50 tweets will.”
The opportunity that more crisis managers are seeing lies in the situational awareness that comes from analyzing massive amounts of social data generated in disasters. In those moments, “the public is a resource, not a liability,” said FEMA administrator Craig Fugate (@CraigAtFEMA) last year. “Social media’s biggest power, that I see, is to empower the public as a resource.”
