First Guest Blogpost: Social Media in Disaster Situations

This is the very first time I accept a guest blogpost from anyone and I hope you enjoy it. Kate Manning gives a very good overview of what happened in the US recently and how social media played a crucial role in disaster response.

Social Media in Disaster Situations

Residents of the United States Eastern Seaboard aren't likely to forget the last days of August, 2011. In just one week, a rare earthquake and a dangerous hurricane struck the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions, leaving behind casualties, injuries and billions of dollars in damages to property and infrastructure. The two natural disasters were significant in scope and magnitude, but what made them truly remarkable was the impact of social media on disaster management for both events.

The epicenter of the Virginia earthquake was Louisa County, but social media users reported feeling the main tremor and aftershocks as far away as Georgia and parts of Canada. In fact, tweets sent from Virginia reached users in other parts of the country even before seismic activity was felt. These tweets also allowed for real-time disaster mapping, as user-generated maps and info graphics showed a correlation between the intensity of the earthquake and Twitter use.

You don't need to attend an online MBA program to see that the massive use of Twitter during the earthquake stands as strong evidence of the power of online social networking platforms. As a result, the United States Geological Survey has been inspired to develop a special app – the Twitter Earthquake Detector – which will be used to gather information, photos and impressions about recent earthquakes so people will be aware of how the quake could impact them.

Just days after the Virginia earthquake, residents of the Eastern Seaboard learned about another natural disaster headed their way. This time it was Hurricane Irene, a major cyclone which had reached Category 3 intensity during its trajectory across the Atlantic. Although Irene had weakened to tropical storm intensity in its path through the U.S. Virgin Islands, it resumed strength as it made its way across Puerto Rico. President Barack Obama declared a state of emergency for the island as more than 700 residents were forced to take shelter and thousands were left without potable water.

As the Hurricane Irene made its way towards the East Coast, social media was once again at the forefront of disaster management and preparation. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) debuted its app on Aug. 26, just in time to be a part of the preparation efforts already underway for Irene. Upon release, the FEMA app featured emergency preparedness information in English and Spanish, a handy check-off list for putting an emergency kit together, an interactive map showing the location of shelters and recovery centers, and more.

Due to Irene's impending landfall, the launch of the FEMA app was a hasty affair. The app was only available on the Android Marketplace, and some users running Honeycomb 3.1 were not able to download it. There were also concerns about whether the shelter data was all-inclusive (i.e., if shelters provided by faith-based organizations had been considered). FEMA promised to improve  the app and to release versions for the iPhone, iPad and Blackberry devices in the following weeks.

Other services unveiled by FEMA in the days leading up to Hurricane Irene's landfall involved text messaging, Twitter and Facebook updates. Twitter, for its part, had recognized the importance of Short Messaging Service (SMS) networks in emergency situations and introduced its Fast Follow service just weeks before Hurricane Irene. Fast Follow allows any cell phone user to receive Tweets via SMS even if they haven't signed up for Twitter online. This allowed residents of the East Coast to get FEMA updates on their cell phones by simply sending the word “fema” to 40404.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, the public is signaling a preference for social media reporting than the traditional histrionic antics of television weather reporters. New York City has opened its government data mine for anyone to explore the effects of Hurricane Irene, and application programming interfaces are expected soon.

Written by Kate Manning.

Kate Manning didn't expect to find herself at the intersection of business, marketing, and the Internet, but with sound writing and editing skills, she makes the most of it with www.mbaonline.com