Krazy kippers batman it’s a facebook emergency!

In my quiet moments lately I have been musing about how the changes in online communication alter things for emergency planners. Others, I admit, play tennis or watch the footy to relax. Each to their own I say.

First, let’s establish what I think is happening in online communications. Broadly, I think that communication has flattened and speeded up. The barriers to publishing finally went when decent blogging platforms were developed. The barriers to distribution have also crumbled with the widespread use of social media tools. Only a few years ago, emergency planners scared each other with stories about how quickly Sky could get a film crew on site. Now anyone with a phone can beam live images, audio, video, commentary, whatever you want around the globe before the incident officer has been woken from their gentle slumber.

There is some good news. Social media platforms are being used, right now, to disseminate information that the general public needs to know about emergencies. Visit the website of the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command and you’ll see facebook, twitter, flickr, youtube, del.icio.us, digg, rss and even e-mail icons ranged in serried ranks. With 1/3 -1/2 of the UK population on facebook it would be madness not to try to give them important messages via that platform. You can’t invent this stuff on the fly. Or rather, of course, you can but you don’t need to and you shouldn’t. It would be more effective to gather followers and likers in advance of an event. This will help to establish authenticity and have a whole army of distributors of your message. This is important. It is a strange and lawless world out there my friend. Some people seem to have taken bpglobalpr at face value. Well BP encouraged them to be explicit about the fact that it is a visceral, angry and penetrating satire.

This subject was explored a bit at localgovcampy&h (in a session I helped out with). There are a few (a very few) examples of local authorities using twitter effectively to communicate school closures (for example). The best examples (such as Newcastle City Council) already had an established and popular twitter feed. People use social media differently too. They talk to it. Not like people shout at John Humphreys on the radio but actually interact with it. Your carefully crafted public message will be challenged, added to, and argued with. Do you need to respond? Yes, yes you do.

We could go further. You could have a map ready to read your twitter stream and map whatever you push into the world. I can see this being really useful for a rising tide incident (literally or metaphorically) closing roads all over the place. That would be of interest to your partner agencies and the public and, well, all of us.

We could go further. You could have a map that reads twitter generally and maps reports with a specific hashtag. You could use that to map flood reports. People could game the map but probably most people wouldn’t and you could keep an eye on that. Imagine that, moderate quality information and no-one needs to answer the phone.

In any case monitoring social media seems to be a must, not just for lonely journalists and PR merchants but for anyone with a professional interest in knowing what’s kicking off.

In a future post I’ll look at the sort of things that I’d like to see put into an emergency plan with regards to online tools. If that would interest your good selves.

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