You’ve got to check out this fascinating video of Craig Fugate, Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), explaining why his agency plans to engage the public more in disaster response via mobile phones and social media.
“A government-centric abroad to solving disaster problems will fail in a catastrophic disaster,” he says. “It is a brittle system that does not have the resiliency that we have when we can incorporate the rest of the team: the public, the volunteers and NGOs, and the private sector.”
Fugate says the public and crowdsourced websites are putting out better situational awareness than many agencies can. He calls for government and relief agencies to figure out how to have two-way conversations that use the public as a resource. Specifically, he is pushing more open data feeds and geospatial data and mapping applications.
What do you think about using social media in an emergency response? Please share your comments.
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What do you think about companies who find you xx number of Twitter followers for xx dollars or following accounts on Twitter that use hashtags, such as #teamfollowback, #followback, or #ifollow?
Did you mean to leave this on my previous post on managing your online presence at http://www.eventuresincyberland.com/2011/02/top-10-social-media-tips-for-online-success/? In terms of an emergency response, I think your best course of action is to leverage already existing social presences to disseminate and coordinate information among affected and interested parties, the media, etc. That, of course, means building your social media presence up before an emergency.
I’d be careful about “buying” followers unless the company you hired could show you a sound strategy to identify accounts with interests similar to yours. Getting followers who don’t care about the same things you do is unlikely to produce any meaningful results now or in the event of an emergecy.
You bring up quite a few quite useful tips. Worthy of a read through. I have sent your link on to friends
Thanks so much, Tabares, for taking the time to comment on my blog.
Are there any case studies written on this subject? Is FEMA taking action on this? Thanks.
FEMA is taking social media and emergency management very seriously. Just yesterday FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate testified about social media’s importance before the House Committee on Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Communications (see page seven of http://homeland.house.gov/sites/homeland.house.gov/files/Testimony%20Fugate_0.pdf). If you are not already doing so, you might also want to follow the Crisis Comms Command Post, iDisaster 2.0, Social Media 4 Emergency Management, and The Face of the Matter blogs. All of them cover best practices for using social media before, during, and after a crisis.