July_August 2011 Emergency Management Magazine_Social Media

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B Y A D A M S T O N E | C O N T R I B U T I N G W R I T E R

HARNESSING

EMERGENCY MANAGERS ARE INCREASINGLY TAPPING SOCIALMEDIA TO CONNECT WITH COMMUNITIES.

When the skies dumped 20.2 inches of snow on Chicago in February 2011 the third-largest storm in the citys history emergency managers rushed totheir computers.

Using a combination of Facebook and a homegrown texting system called NotifyChicago, managers pumped out a steady stream of information on school closures, cityservices, weather updates, car towing and, eventually, cleanup eorts.

is gave us the ability to communicate quickly and eectively, said RoderickDrew, director of media aairs for the Chicago Oce of Emergency Management andCommunications. It allowed us to tell people to exercise caution, to not travel unlessthey had to [and] to leave work early if they had to go to work. We needed to let themknow that this was not a r un-of-the-mill snowstorm.

Drews oce is not alone in its eorts to harness the power of social media in timesof crisis. Across the nation, emergency managers are striving to t weet their way intothe public eye and to put t heir best Facebook forward.

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SOCIALMEDIA

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About 20 percent of the emergency man-

agement community is involved in some form

of social media, a ccording to Kim Stephens, a

senior associate at Abt Associates and creator

of the blog iDisaster 2.0.

Some 550 emergency management oces

have a presence on Facebook, including many

state oces.

It all boils down to having an avenue for

communications, Stephens said. If you look

at the way people are communicating with

each other, they dont watch the news, espe-

cially the younger generation, Stephens said.ey are looking for content when and where

they want it. If you are not in that space, you

are missing an opportunity.

What is the opportunity, exactly?

WHOTUBE? YOUTUBE

For Adam Crowe, social media oers the

opportunity to put a human face on the emer-

gency management community, while simul-

taneously showing what the work is worth.

We wanted to give people some sense of what

they are getting from the city, where their tax

dollars are going, said Crowe, assistant di rec-

tor of community preparedness in Johnson

County, Kan., population 560,000.

Crowe is bringing emergency management

home to citizens with YouTube, via a channel

he uses to push out messages on a wide range

of public issues.

His oce usually interviews a duty ocer

during severe weather and puts the video online.

When the local media conducts an emergency

management interview, Crowes team is right

alongside recording the interview, using a

home video camera and $60 editing soware.

ey then broadcast it on YouTube. Crowe has

even used YouTube to run light-hearted pub-

lic service ads through its Preparedness Piggy

campaign. (For holiday cheer, the pig presents

the 12 Days of Preparedness at www.youtube

.com/watch?v=8vIn71DxlEA.)

YouTube is a prime way for us to put a face

on emergency management, he said.

eres some care and feeding here: Crowe

needs a team to shoot the YouTube install-

ments, edit the video and upload the content.

For some, social media is a way to get an even

quicker hit, something thin and simple to steer

people toward further details.

As executive director at the Salt Lake Ur-

ban Area Security Initiative (UASI), Alicia

D. Johnson works with 17 municipalities. To

communicate with these municipalities on-

line, she needs a single, consolidated means

to push out a lot of information easily

which her blog does.

is is convenient for posting one link to

share documents from UASI leadership rather

than forwarding a slew of e-mails. Similarly if

Johnson wants to share a YouTube video, shell

put a link in the blog, rather than push the size

parameters of e-mail.

Johnson uses tumblr.com, a free microblog-

ging service, to broadcast her message. She could

have blogged through her own site saltlakeuasi.

com, but the commercial host has better tools, in-

cluding a newly added ability to upload an entry

directly from her phone. So much of what emer-

gency managers do is to be very mobile in our

jobs, she said. We have iPads, we have laptops,

we have phones we are constantly moving and

we need tools that respond to that.

CUE CANARY SOUNDTRACK

For emergency managers, the social network-

ing tool Twitter has proven especially powerful.

Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, N.M., about six

miles northwest of Albuquerque, has 6,000 resi-

dents, and about 800 of them follow Emergency

Management Coordinator Je Phillips tweets.

He sends out a steady stream of commentary on

weather and re, event updates and emergency

management news. Followers weigh in with

observations of their own on all these subjects.

Tweeting is fast: A message hits followers

instantly. Its two-way, with followers sharing,

correcting or amending with comments of

their own, giving managers immediate feed-

back on their communications. And its free.

As with most social media, Twitter requires

no infrastructure investment. It costs time; it

doesnt cost money, Phillips said. We have

ongoing discussions about the return on that

time investment, but to me its a no-brainer.

Phillips said he has been making fewer

phone calls and sending fewer e-mails as his

Twitter entourage has grown. More than this,

the constant interaction has helped him to hone

his communications. By engaging in a constant

dialog, my messaging has become far stronger

than it has ever been, he said.

TWOWAY STREET

Twitters promise of two-way talk is one that

pervades social networks, and its a major draw

for emergency managers looking not just to

In the old days, my mindset was to hold tight to information, to not

really disclose a lot of information. So the big transformation for me has

been to realize that information already is being exchanged, and that I

am just a piece of that puzzle.

JePhillips, emergency management coordinator, Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, N.M.

Chicagos Oce of Emergency Management used Facebook and a homegrown texting system to keep citizensabreast of weather updates and city services during a recent snowstorm. Photo courtesy of Antony Mores

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disseminate their message, but also to hear what

the public has to say. In particular, social net-

works can be a boon to situational awareness.

Every citizen is a sensor. Now that everybody

has these cell phones on their hip, they have the

opportunity to give information, Stephens said.

Maybe you dont know that a street has not been

plowed, or you dont know that a place does not

have water. Heres a way tond that out.

Phillips relies on a citizen corps of followers

to help him take advantage of this capability.

Its part of my concept of operations now. I

have trusted agents all over the state who I canask to work with me directly when I am work-

ing on emergency response issues, he said.

ey can have my back, watch for issues and

trends, hit me up on the social media platforms

to pass along road conditions, how much snow

has fallen, what the wind speeds are.

Others are using social medias conversa-

tional aspect to gather feedback on current

incidents and departmental initiatives.

I have sent out an information request on

Twitter say we are looking for feedback on

WebEOC [incident management soware]

and within an hour I have gotten multiple re-

sponses from all over t he country, Johnson said.

I dont know that I would have been able to

reach the same number or types of people who

I was able to reach without my social network.

Although this information is a boon, it

presents new challenges that have not yet been

fully addressed: What to do with all this data?

How to separate the wheat from the cha?

Stephens points to one early e

ort, the so

-ware platform SwiRiver from the open

source project Ushahidi.

e soware gathers real-time data from

channels like Twitter, SMS, e-mail and RSS

feeds, lters it through various algorithms

and produces a visual representation of the

data with keywords for ltering.

e outcomes help users get a quick snap-

shot of conversations surrounding a given

topic, but it requires volunteer labor to organize

the search. It still takes a lot of human eort,

Stephens said.

RULES OF THE ROAD

While many parent governments have

been open to social media, some trepidation

remains. When conversations are open and

spontaneous between the public and ocials,

there arises the possibility of mixed messages,

bad or incomplete information and similar

hazards or so the thinking goes.

Two and a half years ago, the attitude was,You can do this, just dont get us into any hot

water, Crowe said. What if I say something

bad or misleading? Or if you have a follower

with some antigovernment rant on his website,

is that a reection on the county or our policies?

We had to nd a balance in all of these things.

Johnson Countys response has been to f or-

mulate a specic policy for social media use.

Highlights of the policy include:

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Departments/agencies must specify at least

two individual employees who have authority

to speak for the department/agency via social

media sites.

Departments/agencies must control the use

of user names and passwords associated

with social media sites, ensuring that own-

ership is Johnson County and not restricted

to any one person.

Departments/agencies must immediately

change user names and/or passwords if an

employee previously authorized to speak

for the department/agency via social mediasites leaves employment or is otherwise no

longer authorized to speak for the depart-

ment/agency.

Employees are expected to protect the

countys condential and proprietary in-

formation, and are prohibited from sharing

topics that are condential or proprietary.

Employees must respect copyrights, trade-

marks and service marks. Proper credit

for others work must be clearly indicated

on the site.

e use of ethnic slurs, personal insults,

defamatory language, obscenity is strictly

prohibited.

Even as emergency management oces are

working out the details of their social media

programs, the related disciplines ofre and

police are ramping up their use of these tools.

In September 2010, the International

Association of Chiefs of Police surveyed 728

law enforcement agencies from 48 states and

the District of Columbia, and found wide-spread adoption:

81 percent of agencies surveyed use social

media.

67 percent of agencies surveyed have a Face-

book page.

35 percent of agencies surveyed have a social

media policy and an additional 23.2 percent

are in the process of craing one.

Of the agencies not currently using social

media, 62 percent are considering its adoption.

Social media platforms in themselves are

not overly complicated. e fact that millions

of everyday users have found their way onto

Twitter and Facebook suggests there is little if

any technical complexity involved.

Nor are they expensive. Without the need to

install new infrastructure, the biggest invest-

ment comes in the form of time: Setting up

accounts, broadcasting updates and monitor-

ing conversations.

e greatest challenge, however, may well

be in the realm of mental adjustment.In the old days, my mindset was to hold

tight to information, to not really disclose a

lot of information, Phillips said. So the big

transformation for me has been to realize that

information already is being exchanged, and

that I am just a piece of that puzzle.

Rather than being the sole source of the

news ow, I am just in the stream of informa-

tion now.k

Emergency Management

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July_August 2011 Emergency Management Magazine_Social Media

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