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Yesterday morning my Twitter stream lit up with breaking news reports of an explosion at a Power Plant under construction in Connecticut. In this short screen cast I show how a Google Search and Advanced Twitter Search can be used to gather real-time incident intelligence from people at or near the incident.

When initiating my search I made a critical error. See if you can catch it.

This technique could be useful to:

• Hospitals preparing to receive casualties
• Administrators trying to determine how many off-duty personnel to call in
• Emergency management officials making decisions about opening a county or regional IC
• Selecting which shelters to open or close

How else could you use Google search, Google Alerts, and Advanced Twitter Search for social media intelligence gathering?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

We have a new episode of our bi-monthly podcast for your listening enjoyment. This time, it’s all about the good and bad of Facebook for agencies.

In our third audio podcast you can hear us discuss:

• Facebook presents a unique opportunity to get your message to those you want to reach because with over 350 million users, the chances that your target audience is already on Facebook is very good
• Facebook personal accounts, groups, and pages
• Personal accounts are good for individuals
• Groups can be public or private and are good for specialized communication
• Pages are public and are great for agencies

• • • Networked Blogs
    • Twitterfeed
    • Causes

The need to not just build your Social Media presence, but also to use it

• • • Utilizing a Social Media Team as opposed to a single PIO
    • Setting up a posting schedule
    • “Kicking the tires” of your Social Media effort

Want to listen while you’re on the go?

Thanks for listening!

Recently I made two dreadful discoveries at my primary blog. 1) My Aweber sign-up form was now longer appearing. For weeks my subscriptions had been declining. During this time period that the form was not displaying I had two of my highest ever traffic days. 2) The link to subscribe to the site RSS feed was also not working. I quickly corrected those problems.

I was reminded of the importance of always checking the functioning of links when adding hyperlinked content to a blog page or blog post for my own projects.

Hub and Spokes

Yesterday I searched for the website of a product I would like to purchase – an instruction aid for EMT students. I quickly found the site for the product. The site footer included:

• Mailing address
• Email address
• Twitter icon
• Facebook icon
• YouTube icon

Since I had a question I clicked on the email address. The hyperlinked email address opened an Outlook email message but the address was incomplete (not properly html coded).

The Twitter icon opened a Twitter account with no messages and no followers.

The Facebook icon opened a Facebook page with no content and no fans.

These are my reminders:

1. At your hub make sure the content functions as it should
2. When you initiate  a social media spoke, especially if you link to it from the hub, start participating.

There has been a lot of hype and speculation regarding today’s announcement by Apple of its tablet computing device. The anticipation was high enough to cause an 8-10 minute delay on Twitter a full hour before the actual event.

While the official iPad announcement ends years of speculation regarding the device’s existence, it also confirms that we are moving towards affordable information mobility. It has reaffirmed the existence of “apps” as a programming model. It has placed the contents of the internet, at one time shackled to a desktop, into the hands of nearly anyone and nearly anywhere… including where there is the potential for an emergency.

So how does this change things for Public Information Officer’s utilizing Social Media?

• Mobility is a driving force in the consumer world and this continues to fuel the fire for further mobile development with the iPad being the latest innovation
• The way our target audiences are consuming information is changing quickly
• The types of information our target audiences are consuming is changing quickly
• Our target audiences want the experience to be as conversational as possible and not just a one way broadcast
• Agencies that either haven’t already or don’t soon start using and embracing Social Media to create content, build trust and identity, which can then be harnessed by the apps themselves will be left behind by those that do
• Social Media PIOs will have to think about effective mobile strategies for their content and their message including the possibility of app development

What do you see the announcement of the Apple iPad doing for your world? Share your thoughts in the comments below…

Last week I was intrigued by this tweet from Craig Fugate:

The link he provided was to a shared situational map and reporting center powered by Ushahidi. This open source project was intaking the crisis information through crowd sourcing in near real time locally. Since there was a lack of a centralized command and control center in Haiti to organize and direct the humanitarian efforts, the Relief Agencies were able to turn to this application to determine where there was an urgent need in proximity to their location. You can see how the Ushahidi Haitian Center may be useful to a foreign relief agency operating in the theater of the disaster.

So just what is Ushahidi you ask?

What is Ushahidi? from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

While Ushahidi is an open source project, and therefore free to use, after quickly perusing the source code it will require some moderate to advanced technological knowledge to make it work. Some other places that have deployed the Ushahidi system include MapATL – Visualizing the crime in Atlanta and the Swine Flu Outbreak.

What I really like about Ushahidi is that it centralizes your information into one place that the system updates in nearly real time, and it also offers syndication possibilities with RSS Feeds. I can think of quite a few different applications for that feature set.

For those of you who may not have the technological chops to run a Ushahidi installation, our friends at Depiction have some new software upgrades that may be what you are looking for to create a “Common Operational Picture” for all the agencies involved in an incident. While their video does not address the possibility of crowd sourcing the ability to report incidents, they will be demonstrating these features at a webinar on 1/27/10 @ 1:00pm PST where I am sure they will be willing to answer any questions about how Depiction can be used in that way.

Does your agency have the technological knowledge to install Ushahidi? If not, then what do you think the biggest challenge is to attaining that level of tech independence?

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• Open Source Software in Government (avantrasara.com)
• Why Open Source is the New Software Policy in San Francisco (mashable.com)