Social Media Use by Emergency Response Organizations During #atlflood
Posted by Greg Friese at 22 September, 2009, 9:17 amDuring the disaster or major incident is the wrong time for a Public Information Officer to implement a social media presence. Emergency response organizations should establish a social media presence to report on routine events and engage with their communities and stakeholders well before a major incident. How is your emergency response organization using social media before a major incident happens? There is not time or resources to establish a social media presence in the midst of the crisis.
This morning I ran several Google searches to identify a social media presence by the major Atlanta are emergency response organizations. This is the results of my search:
Atlanta Fire Department website – most recent news stories are about a November 2008 LODD and Christmas time outreach. My search did not yield any obvious results for an official Fire Department blog or YouTube channel.
Atlanta Police Department website – most recent news story is from 9/2/2009. No obvious links to a blog or other social media content from home page.
Atlanta – Fulton County Emergency Management Agency website – column labeled “Information of Interest” contains a current radar loop and two other news items. In the “Links” column there are two links to real-time flood gauges. There are no obvious links to real-time social media content.
Metropolitan Atlanta Chapter of the American Red Cross website – crawler across the top of the page does not mention recent or ongoing disaster. Prominent photo with caption”Red Cross Responds to Local Flooding.” Clicking on picture brings me to a “Disaster Updates” page which includes information on ARC efforts to date and locations of shelters.
Social Media Reporting to follow the flood story:
Twitter users are using the hashtag #atlflood for posts about the flood. This is the RSS feed.
Facebook group Atlanta Flood 2009 has just 21 users at the time this post was written. Members are sharing photos, links, and in-person observations.
YouTube Video. This video – Atlanta Flooding 5 Straight Days of Rain was uploaded yesterday.
Related posts:
- Video: Social Media Presence for Emergency Response Agencies
- Social Media Policies Are A Best Practice For Emergency Services
- 2010 Emergency Social Data Summit
- 7 Types Of Blog Posts For Public Safety And Emergency Responder Agencies
- Episode 6: The Power Tools Of Emergency Notification
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Twitter user @rmcferin, advises me that @WoodstockPD (http://twitter.com/WoodstockPD) – the Woodstock Georgia Police Department has been updating their Twitter account with flood information and road closures throughout the incident. The Woodstock PD website contains a link to the department Twitter feed. (http://www.woodstockga.gov/index.aspx?nid=117)
Greg,
A great way to follow any "breaking" event on the web is using the tool Addictomatic.com. This search engine aggregates results from many of the social media and mainstream websites in a very easy to understand results page.
It is fascinating to watch an event unfold using addictomatic, with folks on the scene tweeting as well as uploading photos to flickr, etc. If you have not seen or used this search engine, I suggest you give it a whirl.
There are other sites similar to this on the web, but I found that this one has the best design and returns results far cleaner than the others.
URL: http://www.addictomatic.com
Thanks
Chris
Christopher, thanks for the tip about http://addictomatic.com. I had not heard about it until you tweeted about it earlier today. Once a user has this massive amount of information the next challenge is sorting through it to find actionable intelligence and new content to change the response and share through other outlets.