American Red Cross Conference on use of Data, Social Media communications in emergencies
On Thursday August 12th the American Red Cross held an Emergency Social Data Summit in Washington, DC. Among the speakers were Craig Fugate FEMA Administrator and Macon Phillips, Special Assistant to the President and Director of New Media, White House and as the Washington Post said “emergency-response leaders, technology experts and at least one social media swami “.
The American Red Cross last week published the results of an online survey with 1058 respondents “Social Media in Disasters and Emergencies” with some very interesting findings.
- One in six (16%) have used social media to get information about an emergency
- Facebook was the most commonly used channel for posting eyewitness information on an emergency or newsworthy event.
- More than half would send a text message to an available response agency if someone they knew needed help.
- During an emergency, nearly half would use social media to let loved ones know they are safe.
- Three out of four would expect help to arrive within an hour
The conference discussed the expectation of the public s that seems far ahead of the resource preparedness of the relief agencies. Some speakers acknowledged that the social media is changing the crisis response and agencies have to prepare to deal with the real-time response, aggregate the information and act upon it. Macon Phillips used the term “Validate, Collaborate & Innovate “to describe social media use during response to crisis. 60% of emergency management agencies across country use social media for a one way push out and are not staffed adequately in social media vs. traditional.
Patrick Meier of Ushahidi mentioned a new tool http://crowdmap.com/ that can be used by the public to create visualizations of crisis responses. Ushahidi is an open source platform that aggregates responses from the public using mobile devices and enables relief agencies to use the data for crisis response. Patrick also showed an example of the technology being used for Snowmageddon the storm that affected the DC area earlier in the year at http://snowmageddoncleanup.com/. You can see Peter’s Presentation on Slideshare, http://is.gd/eeCyH
Kate Starbird from the University of Colorado spoke about a project “Tweak the tweet” an idea to help people structure their crisis tweets via hashtags.. Jack Holt Senior Strategist for Emerging Media DoD/DMA spoke about the importance of three principles used effectively in communication during crisis – communicate continuously, inform people about what you are doing and tell them what they should be doing.
Andrew Noyes gave the audience examples of Facebook being used during crisis and asked people to join http://www.facebook.com/DisasterRelief (half a million members when I joined). Peter Lutsky of Ning gave examples of community tools that helped relief agencies – http://crisescomm.ning.com/ and http://www.firefighternation.com/. Lauren Vargas of the Social media analytics firm Radian6 stressed the importance of having a social media emergency plan before a crisis occurs.
Craig Fulgate FEMA administrator very eloquently saying that during s crisis response situation “Check your egos and logos at the door” and “During disaster response & recovery, the public is not a liability – they’re a resource.” . Partnership and team building to bring together core competencies was crucial and asked attendees not to focus on the tools but outcomes. You can see portions of his talk here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDsuKHwP6CM&feature=player_embedded the conference was a whole day conference. On stage the panel lead by Eric Kuhn CNN’s Interaction producer presented case studies of disaster responses using the community and tools. Amy Morris of Federal News Radio moderated Federal, State and Local Government: Responding to the Challenge Robert Scoble moderated a panel on “Finding Solutions” and Heather Blanchard – Call to Action: The Roadmap Forward. A detailed agenda can be found at the Red Cross Conference site. Thanks to Red Cross team and Wendy Harman Social Media Director of Red Cross for a great conference and Geoff Livingston of Zoetica for giving me a heads up.
As the conference was taking place a group of volunteers lead by Rachel Weidinger started “Social Media Managers Without Borders” and began a drive to get volunteers.
Here are links to collaboration tools and archives:
- Emergency Social Data Society on Whrrl (http://whrrl.com/j/W2B7B97)
- Wiki http://crisisdata.wikispaces.com
- Collaborative White paper : http://emergencysocialdata.posterous.com/
- Video of the whole conference on C-SPAN :
Coincidentally it was a day of crisis for the DC area. A thunderstorm passed through the region downing several trees and power lines. One of the attendees to the conference Dave Weinberg tweeted “Can’t reach 911. In laws trapped in tree destroyed house in Silver Spring. Hey crisis ppl – help! #crisisdata”.
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