How should we restructure 'first responder' emergency services in a world where they're now the second responders?

It's fairly widely acknowledged throughout the emergency community that due to the rise in citizen use of technology, emergency services are now rarely the first on the scene of a disaster.

Most emergencies are first publicly highlighted on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or another social media platforms as people proximate to the situation take photos and share messages, often even before anyone bothers to call an emergency hotline.

Once information about an emergency is shared online it can attract individuals, to assist or gawk, and by the time a 'First Responder' reaches the scene, there may be teams working to rectify the situation, whether officially qualified or not.

For large emergency and disaster scenarios, online systems may also appear with surprising rapidity. Donation-taking sites, rehousing services, advice and support lines and even running video and text commentary can be in place within minutes of a significant disaster.

The effect of this is that emergency services are no longer the first responders to the majority of emergencies, and often arrive at a scene with less information about the situation than citizens have already collected and shared online.

Even where citizens are not the first onsite, they may still become a major channel for sharing information - correct or not - about the emergency, as was observed during the Boston Marathon bombing (refer to the trailer for a new documentary on this below).


So how should emergency services and governments respond to an environment when they are no longer the first responders?

While there's been some discussion of this across the emergency community, there's been precious few changes to the protocols or approaches of emergency services to take advantage of their new status in a positive way.

Other than discouraging citizens from getting involved (as they're not qualified and may take the wrong steps), and a few efforts to bring some citizen social media intelligence into emergency centres, there's been little done to provide new tools and systems for supporting voluntary emergency support activities by the general public.

Some of this, perhaps most of this, is related to slow change within these services. It's hard for lifelong emergency service specialists to acknowledge that their role is changing - some still struggle with some of the modern tools for managing emergencies, let along with groups of citizens pitching in to help.

Some is also undoubtably connected with the risks of having unskilled volunteers onsite at some of the worst disasters. Many people don't understand or appreciate the potential dangers they face, or the complications they can cause to emergency services should a well-intentioned effort to help become another person needing rescue and resources.

However this situation is not likely to go away. Citizens are now firmly established as the first people onscene in most emergencies, and it is impractical to expect that at least some of them won't try to help and illogical to expect that no-one will broadcast unfolding events via digital channels.

It is a good time for emergency services to consider how to direct all that volunteer energy in productive ways. What tasks can citizens do at the site of a situation that will help pave the way for the 'second responder' emergency services when they arrive?

These tasks are likely to change by emergency type, however it is possible to provide basic guidance via social channels and via apps as to what steps will help preserve lives and property rather than increase the danger and difficulty of given emergencies.

With the right approach and support tools, emergency services can enlist citizens as a support workforce, able to set a perimeter, collect location-specific data and even, where safe, help address and transport the injured to appropriate services, allowing emergency workers to concentrate on the more difficult wounds and tasks.

Tools such as a 'Tinder' app for medical professionals could help quickly locate appropriately qualified personnel nearby who can lend a hand, prior or after emergency services arrive. The same approach could be used for people with specific skills useful in emergencies - from former and off-duty firefighter to army reservists, specialists in communication or the use of specific tools.

There's likely a range of other approaches that can be used to help direct the energy of the general public into supporting emergency services in effective ways, and its time for emergency services to unbend, recognise that the environment has changed, and think outside the square as to how citizens can be more than dangerous nuisances at an emergency scene.

The real risk now is that emergency services cling to their past 'first responder' status and dismiss the skills and capabilities of the public. This will only increase the danger in future scenarios where well-meaning citizens, denied effective leadership and instruction by emergency professionals, take unnecessary risks when helping emergency victims and scale up the extent of these disasters.

Regardless of whether emergency services choose to recognise that they're no longer the first responders in most disasters, or keep their heads firmly in the sand, we're likely to continue to see citizens be the first responders, and once on-scene helping in the ways they think they can and should.

Whether these citizens are assets or liabilities in any specific emergency comes down to how the professional emergency services support and lead them, but they will come none-the-less.

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Support the Emergency 2.0 wiki's founder to present and participate in the 5th International Disaster and Risk Conference in Switzerland

Eileen Culleton, the Founder and CEO of the Emergency 2.0 Wiki has been offered a speaking slot at the 5th International Disaster and Risk Conference (#IDRC2014) and is crowdfunding the money she needs to get there.

The International Disaster and Risk Conference from IDRC is one of the world's premier risk management conferences, attracting over 1,000 delegates from more than 100 countries and supported by hundreds of disaster and risk management organisations, associations and not-for-profits around the world. This year it is being held from 24-28 August in Davos, Switzerland.

The Emergency 2.0 Wiki is a free online global resource and knowledge sharing hub for using social media and new technologies in emergencies. The wiki serves a global hub for emergency response agencies, government, NGOs, schools, hospitals, community groups, faith based groups, business, media and citizens to use social media to better prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies.

The wiki includes tips, guides, mobile apps, mapping tools, videos and an international directory of emergency services on social media. It has tips for citizens to help themselves and help others, an accessibility toolkit for people with disabilities and guidelines for emergency services, government, community groups and NGOs, schools, hospitals and business.

Eileen runs the wiki (as its voluntary CEO) with the support of a range of volunteers. It does not currently attract funding from governments or risk management organisations.


Eileen's attendance at the 5th International Disaster and Risk Conference is an opportunity to showcase the expertise of Australia's emergency sector and the great work of Australian volunteers within and outside government in building the Emergency 2.0 wiki.

It is an opportunity to highlight and extend Australia's expertise in emergency management to the world.

However this isn't just a speaking slot, it is also an opportunity to shape world emergency management policy into the future.

As a speaker Eileen will be making recommendations for the Post 2015 Disaster Risk Framework that will be ratified at the UN World Conference in Sendai, Japan in 2015.


Eileen ran a previous successful crowdsourcing campaign to raise the funds for the conference fee. She's now crowdfunding her travel.

As a volunteer, Eileen would otherwise have to pay out of her own pocket - which isn't a great way to promote Australia's expertise to the world.

You can support Eileen via her Pozible crowdfounding campaign at www.pozible.com/project/184557

Also please share Eileen's campaign via your social networks, and with your peers across government and the emergency management space.

Every dollar counts!

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Celebrate your social media successes, but don't forget that community trust is the key

In June Baltimore Police Department hit a milestone on Twitter, reaching 50,000 followers.

In celebration of this, they released the following video, reflecting the department's achievement and thanking the community for helping them make Baltimore's streets safer.



It is an awesome video and I totally support and respect organisations celebrating like this. It's important for staff to recognise when their organisation has done well and share in the success, and it can be a powerful way of connecting an organisation with its community.

This type of approach is also a great way to show that an organisation is composed of real people, who are simply performing a role when they don their uniforms. it humanises the staff and can bridge gaps between faceless bureaucracies and corporations and their constituents and customers.

Unfortunately this isn't where the story ends.

Several Baltimore Police officers have been charged with various offenses related to animal cruelty or inappropriate behaviour over the last few years, becoming the subject of significant media attention.

A local newspaper created a response to the Police Department's video using the same music (different lyrics) illustrating a number of these incidents, to paint a different picture of the Baltimore Police and, they said, as a courteous reminder for the Police Department to clean up their own act.


While this second video has only received 10% of the views of the Police video so far (it has been live for about half the time), it is a telling reminder for organisations of the importance of building and maintaining positive community relationships.

If the public are well disposed towards your organisation, they will (largely) support you on social channels. If your organisation has taken actions, or has been portrayed to have taken actions, that place it in a negative light, you will face a greater level of negativity when engaging with the public on social media.

This crosses channels, however is often most immediately visible on social channels due to their speed and reach. Ultimately a bad impression will reflect on how the public engages with your staff via other means - on the phone, in correspondence and in person - making it harder for staff to perform their roles.

Of course, it may take only one disgruntled, sarcastic or delusional individual to create and distribute material like the video above, and may not be reflective of broader community views. However how far this material will spread and how fair a representation it is seen to be depends on the pre-existing negative or positive views of your organisation.

A good reputation will have your community come out in support, a bad reputation will see the material distributed far and wide with support.

Social media isn't just a reflection of the world - it is part of the world. How your organisation conducts itself on social channels can significantly shape community views - creating a positive or negative impression.

So don't take this parody video as a reason to not celebrate your successes or shutdown your social accounts. Instead use them as ways to effectively engage with your community, helping solve problems and participating respectfully and humanly to build and maintain good relationships with the people you serve.

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Using social media in emergency and disaster management

I’m currently in Singapore, having just finished running a two-day masterclass for Singaporean public servants on how to use social media in emergency management.

It is a very interesting topic and one I don’t think is high enough on the radar in Australia or many other countries, although there’s now plenty of case studies on the topic.

Source: http://visual.ly/case-emergency-use-social-media

I’m not going to share the full two day master class (it is both too long and too complex to go through) – particularly as it includes several in-depth exercises where teams create their social media infrastructure for an emergency and then test it in a custom simulation exercise.

However I thought it worth sharing a few of my thoughts on the topic.

Firstly, in my view, not using social media for emergency management invites disaster.

Whether emergency service personnel and management ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ Facebook, Twitter or other social media and online channels is now irrelevant. Citizens, media organisations and other groups increasingly rely on them to share information, tactics and to organise outside of any central control by an agency and regardless of their wishes.

A clear example of this was reported in the Crisis Comms blog, which has a great example of a police department reaching out to media and the public to help them by checking surveillance footage, looking for a suspected murderer.

The media and public were so willing to help that the SB District Attorney then attempted to rein in the situation with a tweet ‘The sheriff has asked all members of the press to stop tweeting immediately. It is hindering officer safety. #Dorner’

Mumbai terrorist attacks (2008)

As the Crisis Comms blog points out, and I agree, it is ludicrous to ask people to stop engaging, particularly after they were specifically invited to help. This misrepresents the authority and influence held by official bodies in our new connected world.

In other emergencies where official bodies have chosen to not engage via social media channels, the gap has been filled by the public, such as in the Mumbai terrorist attacks. There’s simply no way for emergency services to prevent this – and nor should they.

For example after the London riots, some members of parliament suggested closing down the internet to prevent rioters from spreading information.

London riots (2011)

This was in apparently unawareness that rioters were actually using Blackberry’s encrypted message service which wasn’t connected to the internet, and overlooked how valuable the internet was in allowing authorities to elicit the public’s help in identifying rioters (via a Flickr group), helping London residents to inform police where riots were underway and to help other residents stay clear or in the cleanup efforts afterwards, where social media was used as a primary way to organize citizens to clean-up different parts of the city.

Social media also allowed London Police to monitor the relative intensity of riots and allocate their officers more effectively – essentially giving them more than six million additional pairs of eyes in Greater London, without the inefficiency of manning phone lines or sending police out as ‘scouts’ (with all the risks this would entail).

So how can social media help around emergencies and disasters?

Source: http://visual.ly/case-emergency-use-social-media

I believe social media can help in all stages – from helping to inform citizens of what they should do in case of a particular emergency, letting them know when one is emerging/impending (such as a bushfire or flood), sourcing intelligence and communicating information during emergencies to help minimise casualties and direct resources where they are needed and, in the recovery, to marshal the right resources and supplies to the right places via volunteer citizen labor and donations.

Social media, in helping people share their experiences during a disaster, can also help with psychological recovery, something strongly reported in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake, where its been reported that social media has replaced churches and community centres (many of which were destroyed) as the place where people support one another and share experiences.

Christchurch earthquake (2011)

To conclude, social media is now part of the fabric of society, normalized into how many people communicate and share information.

It needs to similarly be normalized into emergency and disaster management plans and activities, used productively and effectively to aid professional emergency workers in their roles and to inform and engage citizens as appropriate in specific situations.

Emergency authorities who are still stand-offish about social media, because their management and staff don’t use these channels themselves, or because they have particular concerns or fears, need to bring in the appropriate talent to help them normalize social media in their own operations, otherwise they may be placing lives at risk.

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Gov 2.0 Canberra lunch event videos from February

Gavin Tapp has done his magic and so, with the assistance of the ACT Government, I'm happy to present both videos from the Gov 2.0 event I ran in Canberra on the 14th.

I've embedded both videos in order below with the bios of the speakers.

Darren Cutrupi

Darren Cutrupi has been the Manager, Media and Community Information at the ACT Emergency Services Agency for the past nine-and-a-half years.

In that time he has taken the ESA from having no real system to provide the community with alerts, updates and warnings to now be an industry leader in the provision of timely and accurate public notifications of emergency incidents.

This includes the ESA website, social media accounts, an internal process the ESA calls THE SPOT (The Single Point Of Truth) and an internally designed app to take care of all the technical side of publishing and distribution information to a range of sources, platforms and people in real time.

Before joining the ESA, Darren spent fifteen years working in commercial radio in NSW, ACT, QLD and TAS, initially as an announcer then as a journalist at stations including 2UE, 2HD, 2CC, 2CA, 104.7 and MIX 106.3. Darren reported from the scene of the Old Canberra Hospital Implosion and won a radio industry award (RAWARD) for his work as the local journalist at 2XL Cooma during the Thredbo Landslide.

Darren has built several websites using WordPress and is also a massive Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles fan.

Ben Fowkes

Ben Fowkes leads the consultancy team at Delib UK, a digital democracy company based in the UK, helping governments, the NHS, the police and local authorities to take part in meaningful citizen consultation and engagement online. He has worked extensively with Scottish, UK, Canadian and Australian Governments, as well as private sector clients such as National Grid.

Ben speaks regularly to bodies in the UK about online engagement, most recently presenting to the UK police foundation at their third annual conference on connecting the police with the public.

Ben will be speaking about the Gov 2.0 situation in the UK. He will unfortunately not be able to speak about the UK GovCamp as it was delayed due to snow.

Disclaimer: This event's organiser, Craig Thomler, operates Delib Australia, a subsidiary of Delib UK, and is hosting Ben in Australia. Ben will not be giving a corporate presentation, instead focusing on the development of the Gov 2.0 movement in the UK.

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Register now for the first free Gov 2.0 lunchtime event in Canberra for 2013

Canberra's free Gov 2.0 lunchtime events continue for the fourth year in 2013, with the first monthly event featuring two great presentations:

• “R.I.P. to the media release, hello crowd sources” on the use of social media in real-time emergency communications by Darren Cutrupi of the ACT Emergency Services Agency, and 
• "The British Invasion - how Gov 2.0 is taking the UK by storm" on the state of Government 2.0 in the UK, from British-based Ben Fowkes of Delib UK.

Update: Note that Ben isn't able to give a presentation on the UK GovCamp that was scheduled on 19 January as it was delayed due to snow.

For more information, or to register, please visit the Eventbrite page at: http://gov20february2013.eventbrite.com/

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US government launches state-based food alerts on Twitter

There's a lot of the work and lag involved in releasing emergency alerts using old fashioned approaches such as media releases.

Even when an agency's systems are tuned to fast-track emergency approval processes, when the media release gets distributed that may only be the beginning, not the end, of the process.

The release need to be brought to the attention of journalists and editors, they need to be convinced it is important to their readers and, once achieved, it must be re-written or edited, included in a news report and distributed.

For newspapers this can add a day or more lag, for radio and television (unless it is critical breaking news) it adds at least hours.


Mashable reports that the US government has cut through this by recently introducing its own direct to public food alerts via social media, using a custom Twitter account per state.

This means that the US government can get out the alerts it finds important more rapidly (even accounting for internal checking and approvals). It also gets them to the right audience - people interested enough to sign up for the alerts.

Alerts can (and should) still be distributed by media release into traditional media channels for breadth of reach, however the addition of Twitter-based announcements ensures that people can access the information when government releases it, rather than waiting for media distributors to deign to distribute it.

In this type of approach the government is using social media to bypass traditional media channels - effectively becoming its own media outlet. There's plenty of other activities where government can use this type of approach to great effect - regaining a level of control over messages and reducing the ability for traditional media to spin or obscure important information.

I hope we see the US extending this approach to other forms of emergency - and non-emergency uses.

And I hope Australia's governments will follow this lead - as some agencies already have.

Video below.

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How should public servants report online volunteer work?

Last week the Department of Human Services changed its policy regarding staff who participated in volunteer activities - unpaid work undertaken on their own time.

The Department decided that, in order to protect against potential conflicts of interest, public servants had to report their volunteer activities to their Manager and seek approval to do it. Approval would last a year, after which time the employee would have to go back to their manager and ask again.

The story was covered lightly in a few news sources, including the Sydney Morning Herald in the article, Public servants told to seek approval to volunteer.

Putting aside the discussion over whether a public sector employer should exercise this level of oversight and control over the personal lives of their staff (a conversation for a different forum to my blog), I am concerned about how well this policy might work in the face of online volunteerism.

I haven't read the policy myself, however I wonder about the treatment of online volunteer activities, such as moderating an online forum or Facebook page for a volunteer group, building a website to support people in an emergency, curating Twitter conversations, managing an online chatline, curating pages in a wiki, correcting text in digitalized newspapers, adding records to genealogical databases, tagging photos for a museum, checking wavelengths to detect exoplanets, or establishing donation tools and encouraging friends to donate their own time and money.

These activities might be ongoing, or taken at extremely short notice - such as during an emergency. Often there may not be time to brief managers and seek approval. People would face the choice of either not volunteering (a net loss to the community) or volunteering their time and services and defying the policy.

I can personally think of five different volunteer activities I have undertaken online - just since returning from my honeymoon last month. Over a full year I might be involved in 30 or more separate online volunteer activities.

Real-world activities, such as manning a soup kitchen, painting a community centre or caring for old people may be easy to observe, quantify and classify as unpaid volunteer activity, however I am very unsure about how any agency policy might effectively cover the growing range of unpaid online volunteer activities in which people are now able to engage.

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Are Australia's emergency services ready to engage with social media? BushfireConnect unsuccessful in government grant bid

It's come to my attention that the BushfireConnect team were unsuccessful in securing a small grant under the National Disaster Resilience Grant Scheme to support their work in providing emergency support during Australia's bushfire season.

I've been told that the reason the grant was rejected was that, "as the VIC Emergency Services do not yet have a Social Media Policy, they did not 'feel comfortable with' being seen to 'endorse' Emergency Management Social Media projects by providing them with grants."

All three social media projects vying for a grant were rejected.

Reportedly, they are still working to get their heads around the use of social media in emergency management.

I wonder how many other social media initiatives across Australia have been knocked back due to government officials (at any level) not yet having their heads around the area as yet.

BushfireConnect was established in May 2010 and has been run by volunteers with no formal support from government.

They are currently seeking volunteers to help manage the service once the official bushfire season starts on 1 October.

As they said about the grant result,

We could probably spend hours chewing the fat on the why and the how, but this is the landscape we're all working in. In the mean time, the fire season is starting as early as September this year, so we have stuff to do :) Hopefully we can get sufficient traction this season so that we cannot be ignored in the future.

To learn more, watch the video below of Maurits van der Vlugt, one of the founders, speaking about Bushfire Connect and emergency management assisted by social media at Ignite Sydney 6.

Below this are Maurits's slides from an earlier conference (which seem to be very similar to those used for Ignite).

Bushfire Connect - Trust, Transparency & Timeliness

View more presentations from Maurits van der Vlugt

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Emergency brings out ESA on Twitter in Canberra - too late?

This morning, like many Canberra residents, I awoke to the news of the Mitchell fire.

Like most in the digital age (who weren't close enough to hear explosions), I learnt about it by reading news online, and hopped straight on Twitter to find the latest updates.

I was very glad (and surprised) to find that the ACT Government's Emergency Services Department had a twitter account. They had been providing official advice for the last half an hour from @ACT_ESA. I've added it to my list of government twitter accounts (yes I was unaware of it before).

I was not happy to see that while they'd been on Twitter since May, they'd not told anyone about the account and had only tweeted twice previously, saying 'coming soon' on both occasions.

Their Twitter was not listed or referenced on their website or on any official ACT government emergency documentation. It was not listed on act.gov.au, canberraconnect.act.gov.au or referenced in any of the official emergency announcements from the ACT government as a source of current information.

The account only had 156 followers (around 7am this morning) as a result - actually surprisingly high considering!

Tweets were not being coordinated with the information on the ESA website to direct people to the latest (prose) news. It only takes 10 seconds to tweet: "New update on our website at www.esa.act.gov.au #canberra #emergency #act"

On the plus side they have taken a leaf out of the work done by QLD Police Media, by starting to tweet mythbusters and use hashtags, such as: Myth buster - there is no report that the fire close to gas tanks #Mitchell

They are also now responding directly to people spreading incorrect information.

UPDATE 7.34am: @ACT_ESA have increased their following from 156 to 583 followers in the last 30 minutes (while I wrote this post).

UPDATE 7:47am: @ACT_ESA now at 769 followers. Still not mentioned in any official websites.

UPDATE 8:04am: @ACT_ESA now at 859 followers.

UPDATE 8:28am: @ACT_ESA now at 966 followers.

UPDATE 8:57am: @ACT_ESA now at 1,049 followers.

UPDATE 9:44am: @ACT_ESA now at 1,135 followers.

UPDATE 8:32pm: @ACT_ESA now at 1,401 followers

This is serious business. If governments across Australia are serious about supporting citizens in crisis, they need to get serious about social media.

They needs to integrate social media into their emergency planning, build channels online and tell people where to find them when they are needed.

They need to coordinate these channels effectively, managing them as they manage other emergency channels (though maybe not like the SMS channel, where the ABC reported that spelling mistakes in the text message had made some people wrongly believe it was a hoax - UPDATE: Image of the message here and at right).

A public service that no-one knows about is worthless. An emergency service that is not in place and trialled before the emergency is not as useful as one that is pre-prepared.

Governments also need to learn how to use these channels effectively. In this case (EDIT: at 7:00am) the account has not yet used a hashtag (even the standard ones for the ACT, #Canberra and #ACT). It had tweeted 'at' others, but not retweeted others.

It is not as though Twitter is new - it has been around for five years. Isn't that ample time for a government agency to learn the basics of how to use a tool to the benefit of citizens?

More news on the fire is available here.

Please heed messages from the emergency services and police, stay aware of the bus and school closures and don't go sightseeing. The most recent information is being published on ESA's website (though not being retweeted by their account at this time).

On Twitter, @ACT_ESA, ACTPol_Traffic, CanberraTimes and 666Canberra are worth following.

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What's faster than an earthquake? Social media

Last week the US East Coast experienced a 5.8 magnitude earthquake.

While comparatively weak compared to quakes experienced elsewhere in the world in the last year, the event was powerful in one sense.

It demonstrated the speed of social media.

People in New York learnt of the quake before it actually hit, by reading the tweets of people experiencing the quake in Washington.

Yep that's right - news about the quake travelled faster through social media than the actual quake travelled through the ground.

Here's a comic from xkcd (found via Wired) illustrating the point. Note this was written before the quake!

Socialnomics reported that there were 40,000 quake-related tweets within 60 seconds. It also reported that "Facebook said it had some 3 million U.S. users updating others about the event."

This included more than tweets from the public. The Socialnomics post also reported that a proportion of messages came from government agencies,

According to a FEMA spokesperson, the agency put Twitter to use to alert people impacted by the quake not to use cell phones unless absolutely necessary, thereby freeing up some of the lines for emergency calls.

Among the tweets was this one from the Department of Justice – “Quake: Tell friends/family you are OK via text, email and social media (@twitter & facebook.com). Avoid calls.”

Meantime, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tweeted – “I’ve spoken w/ our Police and Fire Commissioners & we’ve activated the Emergency Management Situation Room. Thankfully, there are no reports of significant damage or injuries in NYC at this time.”

Twitter also thought it worth releasing a short 'boast' video about its speed, as republished in Mashable:



The earthquake's impact on Twitter was even presented at the G-Force conference in Melbourne the same (US) day - via this video recorded and presented by Charlie Isaacs, eServices and Social Media Engineering, Alcatel Lucent.



Back to the Socialnomics article, social media is becoming a critical important channel for emergency management,

According to a pair of June Red Cross surveys from more than 2,000 people combined:

• After television and local radio, the Internet ranks the third most popular way for people to obtain emergency information with 18 percent of both the general and the online population directly using Facebook;
• Nearly one fourth (24 percent) of the general population and a third (31 percent) of the online population would turn to social media to alert loved ones they are safe;
• Four of five (80 percent) of the general and 69 percent of the online populations surveyed think that national emergency response organizations should regularly monitor social media sites in order to respond quickly.

“Social media is becoming an integral part of disaster response,” Wendy Harman, director of social strategy for the American Red Cross, said in a statement. “During the record-breaking 2011 spring storm season, people across America alerted the Red Cross to their needs via Facebook. We also used Twitter to connect to thousands of people seeking comfort, and safety information to help get them through the darkest hours of storms.”

Now to spoil a good story, the Wired article in which I found the xkcd comic, Tweet Waves vs. Seismic Waves, did an analysis of the effectiveness of Twitter in warning people about this particular quake so that they could take action to protect themselves from its effects.

The analysis, while limited in scope to this one quake, indicated that barely anyone would have had the time between receiving information via Twitter and taking an action to seek safety.

Of course, social media isn't only useful for earthquakes - fires, floods and many other disasters spread at a slower rate conducive to social media warnings. Also larger earthquakes may have bigger radii, meaning there's greater prospect of people catching news via social media and having time to take action.

There's also still plenty of value in getting news about a disaster as, or just after it happens, elsewhere in the world, This allows emergency management mechanisms to swing into action - in this case every minute saved can preserve lives.

So I'm definitely of the view that social media has important uses in disaster and emergency situations. It can save lives directly and indirectly and help management teams do their job.

Organisations just need to ensure that social media is thoroughly integrated into official disaster management plans and appropriate channels are in place before emergencies occur.

After all, might it not be considered negligence if governments and organisations ignored social media in emergencies when it could save lives?

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Attorney-General's Department supports research into social media use during disasters

As reported in Mumbrella, the Attorney-General's Department is supporting research by the University of Western Sydney into how the public seeks and shares information via social media during natural disasters.

To complete the survey go here.

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