Using Social Media to Track Emergencies and Disasters
Social Media’s ability to help businesses engage with their members, users and audiences is becoming increasingly more common, and something what many in the communications field have actively been encouraging their clients to do.
What’s particularly interesting, though, is social media’s broader ability to quickly share and disseminate critical information when things go wrong, wrong as in threatening, dangerous, and frequently life-altering, which we’re seeing right now with the California wildfires. CenterNetworks points to some of the recent coverage of the fires on sites such as Flickr (see the search term "california fires" for recent images), YouTube ( see the 2000+ results for "california fires") and Wikipedia (see "California Wildfires of October 2007") among others. CNET reports how microblogging site Twitter is being used by news organizations such as KPBS and L.A. Times and individuals Nate Ritter to give updates. And Ustream.tv is showing live coverage of the fires.
Meanwhile, on-the-ball international organizations such as the American Red Cross are using social media tools to help serve as vital and up-to-date information sources — see the Online Disaster News Portal, as well as the Red Cross and the Safe and Well Twitter accounts.
My prediction is that within a relatively short time frame, say perhaps three years, the majority of disaster relief organizations, both government and private, will fully implement real-time information dissemination via text messaging, microblogging and an assortment of additional tools and social networking sites.
Andrea, I agree that using social media networks is a very efficient approach to reaching a global audience. These sites are a great way to stay connected and up-to-date on current events and in this case, crisises. I know that the internet is my main source of news updates. Since networking websites are growing at a rapid pace in popularity and number and contain a large and diversified audience, I think it would be wise of these organizations to begin considering these sites as one of their main media outlets.
Increasingly, my news comes from online sources as well, often from snippets of information I glean on social networking or microblogging sites.
I have always known you had a Madame-Soleil-complete-with-crystal-ball quality…
But I tend to agree with you! BTW: are you in a fire-safe area?
I was just reading another blog about how the Red Cross is beginning to use social media to their advantage. So its neat to see it again in this post.
I love seeing microblogs like Twitter being used for these emergencies like the California wild fires. Its an interesting point that you made about in three years, disaster relief organizations will fully resort to social media to announce such situations.
It definitely makes sense. As a college student, sometimes its all I can do to check the internet to get a basic idea of whats going on in the world. As a matter of fact, I just recently set my homepage to a news Website so that I would glimpse over the headlines every time I get on. It is how I originally heard about the wild fires. That just goes to show how important of a role the Internet plays in the news.
I completely agree, Andrea. It’s a logical way forward given the technologies we have. We also should add a certain cynicism toward mainstream media outlets and the personalization of news through blogs. There just seems to be greater credibility when I hear from a friend living in San Diego, or see a photograph taken by another from Seal Beach. I found I preferred reading a student blog during that nasty Virginia Tech massacre, for instance. This, perhaps, is why we used to find news programmes called ‘Eyewitness News’ so appealing: the idea that the news was coming through unfiltered (even if that idea was unfulfilled on television).
Andrea, I agree that it will be just a few short years beofre we see major disaster relief organizations turn to social media as an important medium of communication. I was just reading an article in PR Week regarding the use of social media during the wildfire disaster in Southern California. I think social media is a great way to get important information out to a mass audience. As others before me have said, the Internet is my top source for breaking news. I think the use of social media during these recent wildfires in California has paved the way for the use of social media in future disaster relief efforts.