COLL 300 Forum 3A: Surveys

Problem: Communication prior to, during, and after a disaster.

Solution: Savvy use of social media by emergency management.

Thesis Statement: Social media, with it’s ease of use, maintenance, viral potential and connections to the public at large, is an important tool to harness for the emergency manager.

     For several years there has been a growing interest in the roles that social media can play during crises. We have seen people post messages on varying services alerting their friends and the public to disaster and distress; federal, state, and local agencies are now taking advantage of these services as well. My thesis should focus on this topic, with the main idea being the thesis statement mentioned above.

     With the use of social media outlets agencies have the ability to reach additional audiences and also overlap pre-existing ones. Once upon a time we could rely upon the idea that the majority of the citizens had either a radio or television; today, this is not necessarily the case. Radio is still widely available, but too many people are not tuning in, with the advent of iPods and satellite radio, many are not listening to local broadcasts. It may still be a safe assumption that the average household has two televisions, but are these TVs watching satellite or terrestrial broadcasts? Too many people are “cutting the cord” and losing their connection to local media, these cord-cutters are not limited to mid- and upper-classes either. 

     Making use of social media allows for an easy two-way connection to the public. An agency can easily collect a large amount of data from the public by posting that an event has taken place in a certain area, the agency has not only informed the public but opened a discussion where community members can ask for and give additional details in near real-time.

     Most of the problems that can be associated with social media, with an exception to bad PR, are issues that we already deal with. Technical issues are present and have been present with many of our solutions for years. EAS broadcasts, tornado warning sirens, these systems are supposed to be reliable, functional and fast; frequently they fail in some way, usually related to an error in communications protocol, a bad radio transmitter, power, etc. Social media’s big failure can happen in the same way, broken telephone, cable, ISDN line or lack of power.

     These are the issues that I really want to express, along with using examples of more recent events where social media has been used either intentionally or accidentally and how the use has aided in disaster response and recovery. This topic may end up proving to be a large one to tackle, with much time being spent on sorting out opinion from facts; yet making use of the research tools available in our virtual library should aid in making the task easier.

     After a bit of digging, I found to have a nice amount of luck using ProQuest and LexisNexis, the latter coming as a surprise. This is because at first it seems as though it was going to be difficult to navigate and pull information. Yet after some research I found it to be very easy and smooth to use and the site produced much information. I believe I will also be making use of the iSeek engine for some supplemental “non-scholarly” information; I found the manner in which that service provides categories, similar to the way LexisNexis allows for the refinement of searches, to be quite helpful.