Chapter 2- Social Media Systems: Overview and Purpose

Chapter 2

Social Media Systems: Overview and Purpose

At its foundation, social media is a set of technologies and channels targeted at forming and enabling a potentially massive community of participants to productively collaborate.

—Anthony J. Bradley, Gartner Blog1

Chapter Objectives

◾ To understand the basic foundations of social media and Web 2.0 applications ◾ To identify the basic characteristics of social networks, microblogs, and blogs

◾ To identify the utilization of photo- and video-sharing sites

◾ To understand the application of tags, keywords, and other categorical devices

◾ To review the emergency management systematic applications of social media

Foundations of Social Media

As described in Chapter 1, social media and Web 2.0 technologies are based on a wide-ranging spectrum of historic events, processes, concepts, and theories of utilization. Perhaps the most significant of these was the development of the World

Wide Web in 1991. This established a common process for individual citizens and 19

DISASTER FOCUS: H1N1 PANDEMIC INFLUENZA By mid-March 2009 the Mexican government first reported influenza-like illnesses impacting the local population. By mid-April 2009, more than 850 cases of pneumonia and nearly 60 pneumonia-related deaths had occurred in Mexico City alone. Unfortunately, these cases were not limited to Mexico City and were quickly spreading throughout the country. They were quickly reported as influenza, but the particular strain was not identified until a few days later when the United States also reported similar cases. This H1N1 “swine flu” quickly spread through the United States. Initially there were two deaths in the United States—a Mexican toddler who was visiting relatives in Texas and a 33-year-old American woman in Texas. In both cases there were underlying health conditions that contributed to their deaths. By late April, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued emergency use authorization for the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS). Tamiflu (oseltamivir) and Relenza (zanamivir) were prepared from the SNS inventory for distribution and use in response to the growing number of cases. Days after this authorization, school districts in central and north Texas as well as other parts of the United States closed all schools and sporting events in response to H1N1 influenza cases appearing in their student populations. Over the next six weeks, the H1N1 outbreak continued to spread through countries in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and was ultimately declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on June 11, 2009.2 Because this event was multijurisdictional and required the response of multiple disciplines to ensure response was consistent and effective, many hospitals, health departments, and other peripheral health-support agencies turned to the utilization of social media to proliferate messages about preparedness and response related to H1N1. Most prevalent of these was the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) use of Twitter, YouTube, Widgets, RSS feeds, and internet-based maps to provide real-time response information, generating both situational awareness and specific protective action recommendations to the general public (Figure 2.1). For instance, between March 2009 and July 2009, the CDC’s Twitter page jumped from approximately 1,000 followers to over 500,000 followers.3 Clearly the utilization of a range of social media and Web 2.0 technologies during this global emergency helped meet the need and desire for information from the general public.

Figure 2.1

Obama receives H1N1 vaccination. (Official White House photo,

Pete Souza.)

users of connected networks to communicate and share information. By the beginning of the next decade, websites were being established that began to consider the possibility of feedback and two-way communications with users throughout shared networks. These systems have since spawned all of the social media and Web 2.0 technologies that local emergency managers must consider for adaptation. This represents the functionalities that are further discussed throughout this book, including crowdsourcing, citizen control, applicable tools, and much more.

Every type of social media and Web 2.0 technology is based on the principles established in Chapter 1. These systems—especially when utilized by emergency managers—must encourage conversation, be transparent, and ultimately be cost effective. These three rules will be evident as social networks, blogs, microblogs, photo- and video-sharing sites, as well as numerous other types of social media are explained in greater detail throughout this chapter.

Social Networks

Social networking at its core is a sociological phenomenon that brings people with shared connections into mutually acceptable social constructs.4 Over the past decade, technology has created numerous systems to help manifest this process further. Related to technology, social networks are online systems that allow for individual users to be grouped together based on common traits such as friendship, kinship, geography, school, or profession. There are numerous variations of this structure that are discussed; however, they all have similarities related to the establishment of a personal profile. This profile contains personal information, including shared or liked internet links, photos, videos, current status, email, and instant messaging. These social networks often also allow for collections of individuals into groups, categories, or other classifications based on shared or common interests (e.g., alumni of a particular school). Some social networking systems maintain open systems for external development of software, protocols, or engaged applications. These user-created applications are some of the most effective for consideration for emergency management professionals.

Most social media experts agree that the first significant social network was the establishment of SixDegrees in 1997, which allowed people to create personal profiles and connect them with friends, family, and acquaintances. SixDegrees was quickly followed up by Friendster in 2002 and MySpace and Facebook in 2004. Although SixDegrees closed its doors in 2001, it set the foundation for what social networks were to become. While Facebook currently is the most popular social networking site, that status has been controlled by Friendster and MySpace at different times and under different concepts over the past 15 years. Additional significant social networks include LinkedIn and Ning. With the gigantic rise in the popularity and usage of Facebook, each of the other systems has needed to focus on niche areas of networking, such as music and art (MySpace), professional networking ( LinkedIn), topic-specific networks (Ning), or certain geographic areas (Friendster ).

Online social networks often contain characteristics of all types of social media and Web 2.0 technologies. They are often capable of aggregating the tools and capabilities that exist in the other social media forms, including microblogging, blogging, video sharing, photo sharing, location-based data, instant messaging, internal messaging, and open-sourced information. However, this can also create a “Humpty-Dumpty effect” where the systematic size necessary to be capable to support this plethora of functionality can ultimately be too much to manage effectively, thus leading to a proverbial fall from the wall of their own success. As stated earlier, with the exception of Facebook, most social networks have had long-term success by establishing a targeted user base that maintains strongly shared common interests.

The application of social networks within the field of emergency management must strongly avoid the Humpty-Dumpty effect. While it is unavoidable to talk about Facebook as one of if not the most important tools currently available for the distribution of emergency management information during all phases of activity, it is critical for emergency managers to conceptually understand social networks well enough to utilize the specific concept and not necessarily the particular system.

This concept is most critically present in the balance between personal and professional use of social media systems. For instance, a local emergency manager may establish a personal profile on a social network such as Facebook to present information to his or her social network. The challenge to this setup is that the emergency manager who holds the profile can only create communication pathways with those individuals who “friend” him or her through the system. Moreover, this profile is both inherently and based on most social networking user systems for personal use and should not be utilized as an outlet for the release of professional information. Additional tools (called Pages and Groups on Facebook) are specifically designed to allow an organization, business, or collective interest to express opinions from a more communal approach. These pages and groups are often completely public with an available uniform resource locater (URL, or website address). These tools can be followed by social network users in a way that allows posted content such as public education, public information, pictures, and video to be immediately shared with those groups. Consequently, an open-access website that automatically distributes content is incredibly valuable for emergency management.

These types of tools must be implemented within the correct types of social networking systems. Emergency managers can utilize the size of Facebook (more than 800 million users) to nearly instantaneously generate a following related to their particular type of emergency preparedness, response, and/or recovery. However, this type of automatic following does not happen on every social networking site and cannot be generated by force or coercion. For instance, Microsoft unveiled a new location-based social networking site called Vine in April 2009 that was specifically targeted to support socially networked connections between friends and family to improve emergency preparedness and response activities during a disaster. The system allowed for text messaging and email technologies to be able to be used during an emergency to contact those within the user-established social network. However, by October 2010, Microsoft discontinued its support of Vine as a social network.5 While no official word was given for their suspending support of the project, it can be presumed that social network users already active on sites such as Facebook, Friendster, or MySpace were reluctant to participate in a new social network, even one with a clear potential benefit. While the premise of Vine was excellent for emergency managers, it ultimately was a poor utilization of social networking for emergency communications and public information. It is this type of evaluation that emergency managers must be careful of as they begin to utilize social media and particularly social networking sites.

Moreover, social networking pages and groups are not effective when established at the time of an emergent incident. By delaying the establishment of these systems, the owner of the page or group has not allowed an organic trust to be developed by prospective followers and community stakeholders related to the information that will be distributed. Therefore, it is absolutely critical that the utilization of these systems occur prior to events to ensure the needed emergency or disaster information is not lost due to ineffectiveness or lack of use. This concept is further discussed in Chapter 4 and Chapter 11.

The final major consideration of social networks is the open source code established within most social networks. Open source code allows developers other than the system designers to manipulate the connectivity that already exists between individuals and their shared networks for free. Put more simply, software applications can be created that run on the social network. Although underutilized within the emergency management field, applications on Facebook already exist that allow emergency notifications (similar to Microsoft Vine), educational games about emergency preparedness, and incident awareness. The challenge of utilizing social network applications is the need for a software developer with a comprehensive knowledge of the source code related to the particular social network. Unfortunately, in most cases this is not available to the average emergency manager but could be overcome via strategic partnerships with internal or external organizations.

Blogs

Blogs are websites that are controlled and maintained by individual users who typically provide regular entries, commentaries, descriptions of activities, or other material such as pictures and videos. Much like the status entry within social networks, the postings are typically presented in reverse-chronological order with the most recent posting at the top of the blog. Most blogs allow for commentary and feedback from friends and followers, which can ultimately lead to a virtual conversation about a particular topic whether related or tangential to the original posting. According to blog aggregator BlogPulse, there are over 152 million blogs on the internet.12 Interestingly, according to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2010 report, there is significant projected growth in the topics under discussion on blogs, a rise in the number of female bloggers, and an increase of the availability of blogs on mobile platforms. Moreover, nearly 50% of all bloggers believe that more people will get news and entertainment from blogs in the next five years than from traditional media outlets.8

Although not always immediately evident, the content of most blogs is usually centered on one central concept. This central concept can be related to a particular political, social, or cultural issue (e.g., tax relief) or simply revolve around the interests of the particular blogger. Traditionally, posting to a particular blog is handled by a single individual (or blogger), but the concept of groups of bloggers sharing one blog has grown over the past several years. This is particularly evident in the emergency management community where groups of like-minded emergency managers have posted content to blogs to facilitate local, if not regional or national, conversations about particular challenges in the field of emergency management.6 Other prime examples of blogs that impact emergency management are those that are presented as journalistic outlets similar to an online newspaper. One of the best illustrations of this type of blog was the “In Case of Emergency, Read Blog” by the late John Solomon.7 As a passionate citizen interested in improving emergency preparedness and response, he was able to provide a unique perspective from outside the industry to highlight best practices, question certain applications, and broaden the discussion about these issues. The concept and impact of citizen journalism is further discussed in Chapter 3.

The last major way emergency managers are utilizing blogs is through formal blogs for their organizations. While present at the local and state government levels as well as local and regional nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), some of the MOST COMMON SOCIAL MEDIA SYSTEMS

Social Network—Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn

Blog—WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad

Microblog—Twitter, Tumblr, and Yammer

Photo Sharing—Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket

Video Sharing—YouTube and Vimeo

Video Streaming—LiveStream, UStream, and Skype

Wiki-Sourcing—Wikipedia

Virtual Worlds—Second Life

Online Radio—BlogTalkRadio

Aggregators—TweetDeck and HootSuite

most well-organized, instructive, and mission-centric blogs are those run by federal emergency preparedness agencies and national NGO offices, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency,10 the American Red Cross,9 and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.11 These blogs routinely share information about current events and often encourage conversation about current preparedness or response efforts, which ensures the transparency so necessary when utilizing social media.

Microblogs

Microblogging is a form of blogging that only allows the user 140 characters to post the content of the message. Because of this shortened structure, microblog posts are often abbreviated utilizing sentence fragments, abbreviations, and shorthand. Although they can have established privacy settings, they are often completely public and accessible to anyone with the URL (or web address). Moreover, because of the inherent brevity of microblogging messages, the topic of the content posted by

IN A NUTSHELL

Twitter posts in disaster struck areas and the areas that are indirectly affected were somewhat similar. Most of the tweets in disaster-hit areas were warnings, help requests, and reports about the environment. Official local authority Twitter accounts set up at the time of the earthquake were particularly useful, well followed and retweeted extensively, especially when warnings of an imminent tsunami were predicted.

—Adam Acar and Yuya Muraki35

individual users is often more erratic than blogs; however, they still typically stay within certain parameters of interest and knowledge.

The term microblog became prevalent among social media and internet users by end of 2007 as microblog services such as Tumblr and Twitter grew in usage and popularity.13 In the relatively short time since microblogging became a legitimate social media practice, Twitter has quickly become the most influential and utilized system available. By October 2010, Twitter reported more than 175 million users with a growth rate of 15 million new users per month, which is significantly higher than the 300,000 new users per month that had been reported six months earlier.15 On the other hand, Tumblr has also seen steady although less noteworthy growth. As of March 2010, Tumblr reported 2 million daily posts with a growth rate of 15,000 new users daily (or 450,000 per month)16 with a user retention rate of 85%17 compared to only 40% by Twitter.18 Although retention rates are debatable due to statistical analysis and chosen definitions, it is important to strongly consider which sources are best for emergency management utilization.

For instance, although several studies have noted that the utilization of Twitter is relatively limited (10% of the most prolific users accounting for over 90% of all systematic postings),14 the importance and effectiveness to the emergency management community cannot be understated. Specifically, Twitter has quickly become a primary source for breaking local, national, and global news. This phenomenon first became evident in 2008 during the Mumbai terrorist attacks on the Indian financial district. News about this event was first reported on Twitter by individuals who were observing the incident and reporting back real-time information (including pictures) about what was occurring around them.19 Consequently, local and national media outlets routinely follow various Twitter users for breaking news, which often is posted well before traditional news wires such as the Associated Press release the information.20

Microblogs have become trustworthy to most media agencies because of one of the fundamental rules related to social media: Social media is inherently self-correcting. By establishing systems that encourage open and transparent conversation, there is a significant and often implied need for response or clarification if reported data is erroneous or misrepresented. Additionally, because social media information is exchanged nearly instantaneously throughout the globe (remember the Connecticut bicyclist from Chapter 1), news media outlets (and therefore emergency managers) can quickly feel confident that information being disseminated via this format is not intentionally inaccurate. It does not eliminate the possibility that these eyewitness reports via microblogs may be later clarified as the bigger picture of the event becomes clear. However, this phenomenon is inherent in eyewitness reporting and is not an intrinsic fault of the microblogging system. This becomes critical to emergency managers as well when incident information is being monitored for patterns and trends related to response. This secondary impact is further evaluated in Chapter 6.

Additional commercial microblogs like Yammer have also been utilized during emergency management and response activities. Yammer, unlike Twitter and

Figure

2.2

Snow

coverage

of

2010

“Snowpocalypse”

from

satellite.

(

From

National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA]).

Tumblr, is limited to select users and thus creates a closed system for updates and information sharing. During the Deep Horizon oil spill in 2010, the U.S. Departments of the Interior and Fish and Wildlife Service utilized Yammer to communicate with various organizations and resource units involved in cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico. By utilizing Yammer, the response efforts were able to utilize one robust source to discuss response ideas, questions, and collect field expertise about the challenges related to the spill. Additionally, Yammer was also utilized by the District of Columbia in 2010 to facilitate telework during a significant snow event that caused operational disruption for the working government and internal agencies.21 (See Figure 2.2.) This integration of formalized response systems with social media is further discussed in Chapter 8.

The small size (typically up to 140 characters) of microblogs naturally allows for microblogs to be distributed via SMS text messaging. This is a possibility because SMS texting services often send small packets of data to increase the efficiency and efficacy of the system. Consequently, many of the microblogging services like Twitter have built-in functionality where the general public can follow certain users by SMS text message rather than through traditional or mobile internet browsing. (See Figure 2.3.) In some communities this has been utilized as a cost-effective alternative to commercial mass notification systems that have become commonplace in many communities, schools, and large businesses.22

Multimedia content is also frequently shared via microblogging services. This type of content includes photos, videos, and internet links that often support or connect to the posted message. This content is typically not uploaded to the microblogging service itself but rather to secondary sites or systems that have created an interface with these systems. Much like social networks, most microblogging services have open access to code development through advanced programming interfaces

Figure 2.3

Social media systems are mobile and portable. (From Adam Crowe.)

(APIs). The API for these systems allows various components to be maximized. An example of this utilization is for URL shorteners. Because website addresses are often long and complicated, it was critical to find a way to shorten their length to minimize the use of the limited number of characters available on microblogging sites. Consequently, URL shorteners like Bit.ly or TinyURL created new web addresses that are shortened in length. Another application of a microblog’s API is the connectivity to secondary applications that allow for systematic management of comments, responses, and integrated messages. For example, there are numerous secondary applications such as TweetDeck, HootSuite, Twitterific, and Echofon that aggregate posted content, responded content, and direct messaging on various microblogging sites. These secondary applications are often also available for other social media systems such as geospatial systems and social networking. Nearly all of these applications are available for computer use and for mobile phone devices. The mobility and portability of social media systems is further discussed in Chapter 12.

The last major consideration for microblogging is the unique vernacular that is often associated with it—particularly Twitter. For instance, Twitter allows for the posting of original content (tweet), responding to original content (retweet), and private messaging (direct messages) between users. Much like the need for URL shorteners to preserve space, Twitter users needed to adopt a systematic approach to COMMON EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT HASHTAGS

#SMEM—Social media and emergency management

#EM—Emergency management

#Gov20—Government 2.0 references

#HSEM—Homeland security and emergency management #WX—Weather-specific tweets37

showing what kind of message was being posted. The answer to this issue was for retweets to be prefixed with “RT” before the message and direct messages to be prefixed with a “D.” For both RT and D, the user to whom the message is in response or directed to is listed with an “@” sign in front of it. If an original message is being posted, there are no codes or terms included within the posting. This utilization of codes allows all users to understand the message and allow for filtering and organization of messages in secondary applications.

In addition, Twitter utilizes additional categorical tools called hashtags. These hashtags are combinations of letters, characters, and numbers that are prefaced by the pound sign (“#”) and represent an issue, event, or condition of shared interest. For instance, citizens interested in posting messages about Halloween might use tags such as #halloween, #spooky, #costume, or #oct31. For emergency management, common hashtags include #EM, #HSEM, and #WX for emergency management, homeland security, and weather-related tweets, respectively. These hashtags can be generated by any user at any time. However, the portions of the Twitter community interested in those topics ultimately settle on a common hashtag or set of hashtags to cover certain areas.

Photo Sharing

There are numerous online repositories for photos within the social media realm. Much like the social networks, blogs, and microblogs discussed previously, these systems are established around users whose content is organized, described, and open to comment in open and/or controlled networks of friends and followers. The organization of photos and videos are generally based on a user-driven classification system called tags. These tags can be words or terms that describe the photo or video in any way the user desires. Tags can be limited to simple physical descriptions (trees, mountains, etc.) or to terminology that is arbitrary (good, bad, awesome, etc.). These terms are then gathered together to provide systemwide examples of that particular tag.

Common examples of photo-sharing sites include Flickr, Google Photos (previously Picasa), and Photobucket. These systems all support the same basic functionality. These particular systems all have basic, free accounts that allow for up to 300

MB,23 1 GB,25 and 10 GB24 storage, respectively. These photo-sharing sites are also owned by major corporations as part of their social media tool packages, which has impacted the usability and social media acceptance in a variety of ways. Flickr, for example, is owned by Yahoo and as of September 2010 had over 5 billion photos stored on its system.26 Conversely, Google Photos is owned by Google with far fewer hosted pictures, but focus is centered on the capability to edit and manipulate pictures rather than storage. Lastly, Photobucket is owned by Fox Interactive Media and is focused on tools that create dynamic multimedia content such as slideshows, scrapbooks, and video integration.

The application of photo-sharing sites by emergency management professionals has primarily been utilized for preparedness activities. Organizations like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) maintain photo-sharing sites that have pictures of all response and recovery activities that their personnel have been involved with. These pictures are available for public download and usable for educational activities. Interestingly, FEMA’s photo-sharing site does not actually utilize free systems such as Flickr or Photobucket due to concerns about the photos usage even though they have adopted comprehensive utilization of many other social media systems.

Although a relatively new technology, some of these photo-sharing systems like Google Photos have facial recognition capabilities that attempt to help the user efficiently and effectively categorize pictures based on those individuals present. The system currently attempts to categorize faces with the tagging responsibility left to the user.27 This type of technology may become widespread during homeland security and law enforcement investigations to begin to identify common contacts and known associates of suspects and criminal perpetrators. This will be particularly useful as users utilize the facial recognition capabilities to comprehensively add the names of friends and family to publicly viewable pictures. This concept of engaging these systems in support or replacement of commercial systems with Web 2.0 systems is expanded in Chapter 14.

Video Sharing

Like photo-sharing systems, video-sharing capabilities both as freestanding systems and integrated into other social media systems have become widespread on the internet. Sites such as Vimeo and YouTube have quickly grown from online storage for videos to public venues for statements from politicians, musicians, artists, citizens, and emergency managers. Vimeo typically processes approximately 4 billion video views per month and increased its user base by 1000% over one year.28 Although impressive, YouTube far exceeds the current utilization of Vimeo by supporting nearly 2 billion daily video views with nearly 24 hours of video uploaded to the site each minute.29 In most cases, a user’s video-sharing page is referred to as a channel.

Like all social media systems, video-sharing sites are designed to encourage connections and networking between individual users. This is accomplished several ways. The most basic tool that establishes networks is the commentary feature available on most publicly posted videos. For instance, within YouTube, viewers are given the opportunity to provide text comments related to the video or the user channel as a whole. Similarly, viewers are allowed to provide more generic feedback that simply states whether they like or dislike the posted video. This feature is also available in many social networks like Facebook. Secondarily, YouTube users are also allowed to subscribe to other YouTube channels to receive updates about users who post content they want to follow. Much like status posts on social networks or microblogs, this strongly encourages the continued networking and potential conversation between two individuals.

In addition to direct feedback mechanisms like comment boxes, video-sharing systems also utilize tagging classification. Not only do these tags allow for greater search functionality within the video-sharing system, they also allow the system to generate lists of suggested videos that may be of similar or related content. This is a critical social media step to not only encourage conversation but also spread discussion and awareness about the topic of interest to individuals and groups outside the known network. For instance, if a video about hurricane evacuations was posted with tags such as “hurricane,” “preparedness,” “ready,” and “evacuation,” systems like YouTube might suggest that you watch another video on personal preparedness for emergencies that had similarly been tagged “preparedness” and “ready.” For most videos, this happens on a relatively small scale; however, there are incidents where certain videos are viewed and shared so many times through these systematic connections that they are referred to as “viral.” This viral video status is strongly sought by most social media users, including emergency managers using these systems.

There are numerous public and private emergency management professionals and related organizations who are utilizing these systems during preparedness, response, and recovery to spread educational and incident-related messages. Posted videos range from professional quality public service announcements (PSAs) to homemade videos about specific issues within the emergency management spectrum. Regardless, these videos are often connected through the tagging and classification system already discussed. Interestingly, YouTube also supports closed captioning capability for any video posted to their site.30 As emergency managers continue to be challenged by providing equal preparedness and response activities for functional and accessible needs community members, this is a free tool that could aid in that process for certain functional characteristics. These challenges are further expanded on in Chapter 14.

Video Streaming

As a contrast to the static storage of photo and video sharing, there are some Web 2.0 technologies that allow live or streaming video to be presented from any computer or mobile device with a working web-ready camera and access to the internet.

Video-streaming systems like UStream.tv, Justin.tv, and Livestream allow users to establish live video streams that are broadcast through the internet via a predetermined web address or channel. Like most of the other social media systems discussed, this streaming capability can also be embedded through APIs into websites and other secondary social media systems. Additionally, these systems create broadcast channels that integrate with live chat, social networks, and microblogging sites to encourage conversation and community around events that have live video streams.

Both Ustream.tv and Livestream were founded and released to the public in 2007. In the short period of time since their creation, both systems have been utilized by various politicians, musicians, artists, and other media figures to control and maintain a channel limited only to their perspectives and purpose. Within emergency management, the concept and utilization of live streaming is extremely limited. Professional conferences and workshops have capitalized on this technology as a business model to increase the number of individuals paying and capable of seeing and hearing the speakers; however, the operational implications of live streaming for emergency managers must also be considered. Specifically, all three major live-streaming systems provide mobile applications via their APIs that allow for the generation and watching of live streams from anywhere there is an internetcapable mobile phone. This type of utilization could be extremely beneficial for field work that requires command and control review but could also be challenging for emergency responders to completely control information available for citizens to video stream at an emergency or disaster scene. These issues are further discussed in Chapters 12 and 5, respectively.

Skype and Video Calling

Skype is a unique software application that is not easily categorized with other social media and Web 2.0 technologies. It is a variant of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology that allows voice and video calling between computers via the internet. Additionally, the system allows voice calls to be made from computers to traditional landline phones or mobile phones anywhere in the world for a small fee. However, the more significant technology component is the capability to provide free video calling. Unlike traditional VoIP technology, Skype does not utilize hosted servers to process that information but instead utilizes the processing on the computers connected to make the call. This type of innovation was based on the peer-to-peer file-sharing systems that quickly arose during the early 21st century via systems like Napster and Kazaa.31

Although the original phone-based Skype system was developed in 2003, video conferencing between two users was introduced in 2006 and later expanded for up to five users in 2010. By late 2010, Skype had well over 500 million users with over 40 million daily users of one of the two forms of Skype.31 Like other Web 2.0 systems, Skype maintains an API that allows third-party developers to construct additional functionality (e.g., sending faxes) not available as part of the standard Skype package. As of 2011, Skype also strategically partnered with Facebook to provide video chatting to all users.36

As an overall tool, the functionality of Skype is potentially valuable to emergency management professionals regardless of discipline. Specifically, many emergency management offices through budgeted or grant monies have purchased commercial video-conferencing equipment and routinely pay for subscriber and usage fees to utilize the video teleconferencing capability. While potentially more robust than Skype, these professional systems are extremely expensive and are often burdensome to setup, maintain, and utilize efficiently. Moreover, smaller and often rural emergency managers most likely lack the funds to support these costly professional systems. The challenge for most emergency managers in converting to Skype is not the cost versus benefit analysis but rather technological hurdles such as concerns over bandwidth and appropriate use policies.31

Although the overwhelming leader in this particular sector of Web 2.0 technology, Skype does have one growing competitor called ooVoo. This system is classified as an instant messaging client but supports much of the same functionality as Skype, including person-to-person video calls as well as group video conferencing.32 The ooVoo system currently maintains 14 million users worldwide with a growth rate of around 700,000 per month. Based on other social media and Web 2.0 technologies, competition is not unusual or unexpected. Like all systems, the functionality that exists on both Skype and ooVoo presents fantastic possibilities for utilization within emergency management.

Other Systems

There are numerous other social media and Web 2.0 technologies available to emergency managers, including aggregators, online radio, wiki-sourcing, virtual worlds, and instant messaging; for the purposes of this book they are addressed as needed in other chapters to expand upon certain implementation or utilization challenges that exist for the field of emergency management.

However, there is one additional system that should be addressed to fully understand the landscape of how social media is being implemented in modern emergency management. In 2010 in response to findings from the 9/11 Commission,34 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate’s First Responder Technologies program released an online network called Communities of Practice. This network was intended to consist of active and retired first responders and emergency response professionals from all levels of government who could share information, ideas, and best practices to improve the readiness to respond to emergencies and disasters.33 Because of the potential for sharing sensitive information as part of the discussions within the system, each user is vetted, approved, and assigned a user ID (userid) and password by DHS personnel.

The Communities of Practice system contains multiple working groups to focus discussion and cooperation among the first responders. Each of these working groups contains social media tools such as wikis, blogs, document storage, and discussion boards. Interestingly, these systems parallel the functionality of many of the social media systems already discussed but lack connectivity to them. While it was a peculiar decision to recreate a new social media system rather than optimizing structure and functionality that already existed and to require a highly secured access, these decisions were made to try and maximize participation from all types of emergency managers. This included those emergency managers and first responders who are used to controlled access systems (similar to other DHS products) and highly distrust the openness of common social media systems. While there are many other communities of practice attempting to embrace the adaption of social media to emergency management, it is important to consider that organized discussions and the sharing of resources is critical to the future successes.

Practitioner Profile: Hal Grieb, Previstar

Hal Grieb (Figure 2.4) currently serves as a training and implementation specialist for Previstar. Previous to this, Mr. Grieb served as the senior emergency planning

Figure 2.4

Hal Grieb.

specialist for Plano (Texas) Emergency Management and responded to several natural disasters while serving in the Florida Army National Guard, including Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Rita, Hurricane Wilma, and Tropical Storm Ernesto. He handled the Prepared in Plano social media campaign and was recognized as one of the top 25 most influential social media personalities in Texas during 2011. While at Plano Emergency Management, Mr. Grieb began focusing on the rise and impact of social media and Web 2.0 technologies on emergency management. Specifically, Mr. Grieb said, “Social media has become a great tool in streamlining the communication to and from community members and allows for efficient online coordination in all phases of the emergency management cycle, which aids emergency managers in more efficient collaborative work flow.” He continues by stating that a benefit is “cost effectiveness of not just the platforms, but also due to the lowering need for time and travel to meetings to engage stakeholders in multiple projects.” In addition, Mr. Grieb believes that the understanding of social media is still in its “infancy” but that a “second, larger wave of adoption and implementation” has just begun. Regarding the future of social media in emergency management, Mr. Grieb stated that there will be “massive impacts in non-resource-rich jurisdictions and agencies in being able to communication and implement web-based tools to help their communities in times of need.” Additionally, Mr. Grieb stated, “As more agencies use these systems, semantic aggregation of common terms and needs will begin to become more uniform and accepted into the programming thereby making these technologies even easier and faster to use when emergencies and disasters happen.” In closing, Mr. Grieb looked to a future change in perspective by stating that “Sooner than later we will be asking the question ‘could you imagine emergency management without social media or other web-based collaborative technologies?’”34

Chapter Terms

Social media: Internet tools that engage nearly instantaneous conversational information exchange through nearly free or free interfaces.

Blogs: Type of social media that allows for unlimited user-generated content posted in reverse chronological order with the capability to share text, photos, videos, and links, along with the capability to tag and categorize entries.

Microblogs: Type of social media that allows for limited user-generated (no more than 140 characters) content posted in reverse chronological order with the capability to share text, photos, videos, and links through secondary interface systems while maintaining internal shortcuts and codes to categorize information.

Social networks: Type of social media that allows for limited user-generated content posted in reverse chronological order with the capability to host and share text, photos, videos, and links through approved friends or contact lists.

Video sharing: Type of social media that allows for user-generated video content to be publicly shared with followers as well as to maintain the capability to tag and categorize entries to encourage the connectivity between videos and users.

Photo sharing: Type of social media that allows for user-generated photos to be publicly shared with followers as well as maintain the capability to tag and categorize entries to encourage the connectivity between photos and users.

Hashtag: Term for the process utilized by users of the microblog Twitter to categorize and sort posted content.

Humpty-Dumpty effect: Concept where technology systems become so large or influential that their growth begins to weaken the effectiveness of their products due to expansion, poor business decisions, or unmanaged innovation.

Chapter Questions

General Questions

1. Which of the following are microblogs?

a. Facebook

b. Twitter

c. YouTube

d. Flickr

2. True/False: Tags are terms attached to posted social media content that allow for the categorization and aggregation of similar information.

3. True/False: Social media and Web 2.0 technologies are the same thing.

Essay Questions

1. Why is social media important to the future of emergency management?

2. How should emergency managers utilize photo and video sharing as well as video streaming for preparedness, response, mitigation, and recovery?

3. Should the emergency management community utilize current social media systems for the development of these technologies or create new systems like the First Responder Communities of Practice?

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Social Media Systems: Overview and Purpose   ◾  20

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