How NOT to Use Hashtags & RTs in a Crisis
/How NOT to Use Hashtags & RTs in a Crisis via Glen Gilmore & Social Media: How NOT to Use Hashtags & RTs in a Crisis.
Interesting Uses of Social Media in Preparation for Hurricane #Sandy
/Kim provides some great and practical uses for social media using Hurricane Sandy as a use case...highly recommend checking this out!
Ushahidi and Designing for Data: Next Steps
/There is no doubt in my mind that Ushahidi and Crowdmap are successes in their own right. The platforms fills huge information gap in crisis operations and people know it. But with any success comes the expectation that you continue to evolve the solution to meet the growing demands of the user base. Ushahidi is at this precipice, the one in which users are realizing just how much more powerful the platform can be, and are demanding this. As one of the leading emergency management agencies in the U.S. (if not the world), the New York City Office of Emergency Management (NYC OEM) has already realized some of the limitations of Ushahidi. In September 2011, NYC OEM successfully deployed Crowdmap for Hurricane Irene, but realized that they wanted more ways to work with the data collected, not just be able to visualize it on a map.
The use of data remains a big question in the near term. Innovation is no longer about the greatest "whiz bang" technology; it is about how existing technology and capabilities can be applied in the best way. In Ushahidi's case, it is how organizations and communities can effectively utilize this data to serve their needs.
This is also the crux of human-centered design as well as design thinking. What do you we need it for? What are the use cases? Where are the points of frustration and failure? What is needed now as well as in 2, 3, or 5 years? Priority must be given to these questions in order to maintain the viability of Ushahidi. Otherwise, private sector will innovate beyond, leaving the platform a notable solution of a forgotten era.
As I mentioned earlier, Ushahidi is successful and adoption rates are growing. The question is where to focus development efforts?
What do you think? What should Ushahidi's priorities be? Where should resources be committed? Who should be involved?
Developing a Social Preparedness/Response Strategy
/Developing a social strategy is never as easy as it seems. And sure, you can take the trial and error approach to social media. However, at some point, you will want to develop a holistic strategy to maximize your effectiveness. After all, outreach is very important to preparedness and response efforts. The more your stakeholders are prepared and know what to do, the better.
To maximize your effectiveness, you should develop a social strategy based on four key steps:
- Define your People
- Evaluate your Objectives
- Create your Strategy
- Decide on your Technology
1. Define your People
The people are the most important aspects of this strategy. They represent the whole reason for developing a social strategy in the first place. Essentially, you want to provide real value for them. As such, it is important to define and truly understand who they are.
Here are some helpful considerations:
- How many different audiences do you have? What are they? Why have you split them this way? Are their any internal secondary audiences?
- What are the characteristics of each audience? Are they generally technology savvy? Busy people? Income levels? What are their sociological demographics?
- What is the ability to access technology like? Where do they tend to congregate (online and offline)?
It is very helpful to develop a full profile for each audience to better understand who you will be trying to connect with. This is much a business plan as you try to better understand your target audiences by describing them.
2. Evaluate Your Objectives
Objectives represent what YOUR organizations want to achieve. Of course, there will be consideration for what people need as well, but these should inherently be aligned!
Here are some helpful considerations:
- How many objectives do you have? What are they? Can they be grouped more broadly?
- Are you trying to change behavior? If so, what behavior?
- Do you want to share, produce or curate information? What kind of information?
- Are the objectives clear and concise? Can stakeholders easily buy-in?
- Are there any measurements to know that you have achieved your objectives? Can you be specific? (e.g., 60% of citizens have a preparedness kit)
Developing objectives are not an exact science. In fact, they can and probably will evolve over time. Start to define some and be sure to get feedback from others, including audiences. Where possible, add objectives that you can measure. Ultimately, you will want to evaluate for effectiveness of what you have planned to do.
3. Create Your Strategy
Strategy brings together the different characteristics of the audiences you defined along with your objectives. Strategy represents the intersection of people and objectives. Think through this carefully and be sure to get feedback along the process.
- What kinds of things to you want to do? Do you want to start a blog, a social media account, mapping? Will it resonate with your audiences as well as your objectives?
- Do any of your strategy ideas get priority? Why?
- If you were to diagram this on paper, what would it look like? Concentric, hierarchical, independent relationships?
- Do you have the overall concept? Do understand how the strategy will be implemented and then managed?
- What policies, procedures, guidance or training is needed?
Your strategy will be the most evolutionary as your social/online program grows. It may be helpful to develop multiple strategies and select the best one. You may return to the others at a later time. Your strategy will likely be highly interdependent and connected, so you should take the time to develop this.
4. Decide on Your Technology
Noticeably last is the technology that you will use to accomplish your objectives and strategy. While technology is important, it is more important to first define your intentions regardless of technological capabilities. This ensures that you efforts will be maximized for what you are trying to accomplish rather than being distracted by the wiz-bang features offered.
Here are some helpful considerations:
- What tools are available that will help you reach your audiences? Which ones accomplish your objectives and strategy best?
- Is there one solution or multiple solutions that will meet your needs? What audience facing solutions vs. management oriented solutions will meet your needs?
- Are hosted solutions are appropriate? How much training is needed or are the system(s) fairly intuitive?
- Is the cost of a particular feature so great that you may want to consider assigning the process to someone instead of using a solution?
- What is the cost-benefit associated with certain solutions/options?
The technology you choose to employ is critical. You may be using it for a long time. However, understanding your priorities will help determine where technology is needed the most and if it might be better to go without a particular solution for a while. Give this some good thought and identify your most critical technological needs.
NOTE: Solutions are increasingly offered as "hosted" solutions meaning that no installation is required on your systems and you can access everything from the Internet. The security concerns around this have largely been addressed and many organizations find this perfectly acceptable in addition to being the most economical.
Final Thoughts
For many, trial and error is an adequate solution initially. However, as you grow and get more effective, you will want to outline the most effective way to accomplish your objectives. The consistency you achieve with your audiences will be much appreciated and pay off dividends.
Remember that prioritizing this information is critical. Technology solutions will NEVER be 100% of what you are looking for. It may be wise to accept the 80% solution rather than pay enormous customization or purchase costs for the remaining 20% of features.
Lastly, this strategy should be considered a living document. Update and edit as frequently as needed. You may learn things that you never though of before mid-way through implementation. Keep an open mind and make change part of your everyday!
For more information on this subject, I highly recommend Groundswell: Winning in World Transformed by Social Technologies.
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What audiences and objectives do you have? What strategies have you developed or are looking to develop? What solutions have you found work best and why?
New Social Media class from FEMA's Emergency Management Institute
/New Social Media class from FEMA's Emergency Management Institute, anyone take it yet? Thoughts? http://ow.ly/cMzja #SMEM
Social Media in Disaster Response...System or Delegation Issue?
/NIMS and ICS were developed and further refined out of the need for a unified management structure for response response operations. Since its evolution more that began more than 30 years ago, systems and technologies have begun to challenge the existing models. Hal Grieb, a former Texas emergency manager and social media contributer, points out that as frameworks, NIMS and ICS allows tools such as social media to be implemented during a response, but the frameworks lacks the necessary guidance to address social media.
So is it a supporting technology or a new box in a command stracture?
Adame Crowe, an emergency manager from Johnson County, KS and Hal have discussed two perspectives. Adam discussed some of the structural issues associated with delegation as our capabilities (with social media), including having not grown with our current command systems and our readiness to handle all that independent attention that social media requires is lacking. Hal also raised interesting points about the ability to delegate, which is absolutely correct.
Often in COOP plans, we talk about succession and clearly delineate (hopefully) each persons role in succession, including roles and responsibilities and their authority. Social media in emergency management (#smem), though, barely has these roles and responsibilities identified as best practices are still being developed and socialized. Everyday new best practices are being developed and they are often very unique to each jurisdiction that has put in the time and effort to address this complex issue, often on the preparedness side, not the response side.
If you delegate this to the PIO, training is NOT enough. The PIO must be explicitly aware of his or her roles and responsibilities to support social media in a managed response. The PIO needs to know where he or she has the flexibility (often dependent on the incident) to "run with it" and where he or she should hold back due to potential conflict with operations. This is why a revision of the JIC/JIS is necessary...to help incorporate the operational roles of social media so that it can be delegated appropriately in a command structure.
3 Types of Social Engagement for Disasters
/Social media is becoming ingrained within the daily operations of disaster management. From mitigation through recovery, emergency management agencies are implementing social media strategies. But with limited precedent and understanding for their effectiveness, change is hard. Operationally speaking, how do organizations begin tackling their social media strategy? What tools are being used? Who is assigned the responsibility? And for what specific area? What procedures/policies/processes are being used to support disaster social media?
We know the many social tools that are out there...Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc. The tools, though, don't not necessarily help us achieve our fundamental objective of preparing our communities through effective engagement. This is where strategy comes in and the different types of social media strategies.
3 TYPES OF SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT
Whether you as the Disaster Manager, Public Information Officer, or Intern is at the helm for your organization's social media, it is important to develop your strategy around 3 types of engagement that span all phases of disaster management.
1) Messaging. Probably the most common and time-honored type of communication strategy for disaster management organizations, social media has added tools that enable use to do this more effectively. Press releases, preparedness tips, and incident information can easily be passed through Facebook's and Twitter's status updates.
Public Information Officers (in general) develop dissemination strategies through use of Facebook (using Facebook Pages) or Twitter by increasing the number of follwers. There are also aggregation tools such as HootSuite and TweetDeck (check out 7 Social Media Aggregation Tools to Simplify Your Streams for more tools) that help you manage messaging dissemination. Analytics can also be incorporated through the use of URL Shortners such as bit.ly or Ow.ly. Better yet, show your influence to your bosses and naysayers with Klout, the standard for measuring social influence.
2) Conversation. Probably more difficult, but certainly the next step in disaster social media strategy, conversing with our public is becoming expected and certainly a gray area between messaging and data collection. If the public sends tweets asking questions, they want answers. Conversation is much more expansive than public messaging because it includes going to where the conversation is taking place. These days, more and more conversation is taking place on LinkedIn and niche sites in addition to Facebook and Twitter. It is unrealistic to believe that conversation will only happen on your website.
Conversation, though, can easily eat up manpower and is a risky public media strategy as you develop proper responses to often heated questions and discussions (check out the NYC Social Media Customer Use Policy and the NYC Social Media Policy). But it is one well worth the effort as your community begins to recognize that you are not just listening, but engaging and working on the things that they so desperately need. They need to know not only what you have done, but what you are working on! Begin looking where the conversations are taking place and start engaging now, before the disaster. Create a list of all online places where YOUR communities are engaging and where your organization should have a presence.
3) Data Collection and Management. I will be honest, we aren't here yet, but we are heading in this direction. It is a simple fact, the public is everywhere else that we are not. They are assets in helping us identify and manage unmet need, and in maintaining good situational awareness. But they don't necessarily know what our data reporting needs are and they certainly don't know the best place to feed this information to. But what if we identified existing (or perhaps created) tools that are easy for the public to use and will enable us to do our jobs better? What if we created the processes behind the tools to help manage the flow of information so that public information becomes more meaningful?
Adam Crowe, CEM presented on this future in his conference presentation Going Beyond Facebook & Twitter. He discussed the use of social geo-location tools to ultimately aid:
- Search & Rescue
- Debris Management
- Damage Assessment
- Spotter Deployment
- Field Accountability
Tools like Facebook Places, Foursquare, and Google Latitude are just a smattering of examples. Many new mobile location-based applications are being developed and it is up to us to develop the processes and procedures behind the next generation of applications to meet our information needs from the public. Technology today makes this possible and is a lot simpler than you think with do it yourself tools like SwebApps and AppMakr.
CONCLUSION
Your followers are your community members as well as those in the surrounding areas. Prominent organizations and other response partners in your community are also followers that have the ability to amplify your messages farther than you can imagine. Check to see if your local non-profits or response partners maintain an online social presence and incorporate them into your social media strategy.
What does your social media strategy look like? How is it organized? Who is responsible?
Online Disaster Communities...What/where are they?
/A number of disaster related online communities and portals related have popped up in recent years. I am researching and compiling a list of all social network, portals, blog, and news resources related to disaster management, business continuity, and homeland security. I hope to publish this online in the next month for free. Please comment on your favorite online community. Please include the target audience as I will be organizing the list by end users.
For example, here is a short list of communities that I have already identified:
Reply by leaving a comment below or directly at info@disaster-net.com. Thanks for your support!
The 80% Disaster Solution?
/
Craig Fugate, Administrator of FEMA, spoke about this at the annual International Association of Emergency Managers Conference this past October. His keynote addressed how we shouldn't consider special populations "special" in our planning efforts. In community preparedness planning, all populations should be woven into the fabric of all disaster plans. Appendicies and annexes related to special populations or circumstances should be re-captured into comprehensive all-hazards planning.
I wholeheartedly agree with him, but can't imagine that we are ready for this shift with our current planning models. In a way, we use the appendicies and annexes to help ensure we cover our bases, like checklists, especially with our most vocal, critical, and sensational community members. But even in our best planning, I can't say we have gotten to a 100% solution.
So here is my my case...what if we:
- Shift to a comprehensive planning model not just for all-hazards, but for all populations?
- Aim to achieve only 80% success because we know we will achieve 100% in the end?
- Change our planning mindset to tackle what we can now and cover the rest later?
Will doing these things help us break down our most important issues and avoid being distracted by sensational issues? Will our plans be more effective and reflective of what we are trying to achieve?
What do you think?
Defining Disaster...What's the difference?
/Since DisasterNet has just kicked off, I thought it would be beneficial to start of my blog with a post about defining "disaster." In our hearts and minds, we all seem to know what a disaster is. However, to many people and many industries, the definition of "disaster" varies greatly.
Whether you define disaster by threats, consequences, or resources used, it is important for all people and organizations to know how disasters affect them. Many people and organizations operate knowing that only certain types or aspects of disasters will impact them. So is there really a common definition we can agree on? Or even a need for a common definition?
Below is a list of existing definitions.
- A perceived tragedy, being either a natural calamity or man-made catastrophe. It is a hazard which has comes to fruition.
- An occurrence causing widespread destruction and distress; a catastrophe.
- A grave misfortune.
- A calamitous event, especially one occurring suddenly and causing great loss of life, damage, or hardship, as a flood, airplane crash, or business failure.
National Center for Children Exposed to Violence -
- Events that are relatively sudden, highly disruptive, time limited (although the effects may be longer lasting) and public (affecting children from more than one family).*
*Adapted from the American Psychological Association's definition of disaster.
United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction -
- A serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society causing widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses which exceed the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources.
- An unexpected natural or man-made catastrophe of substantial extent causing significant physical damage or destruction, loss of life or sometimes permanent change to the natural environment.
- An unforesen event causing great loss, upset or unpleasantness of whatever kind.
How do you define disaster, in your personal life, in your industry, or in your organization? Does defining disaster matter to you?
