Where facebook should sit in your emergency plan

There are people sitting in offices near you right now imagining all the worst things that could befall you and your neighbours. They don’t want bad things to happen to you, rather the opposite. On the other hand they recognise that bad things do sometimes happen to good people and they would like to minimise how bad they get. They are called emergency planners, they work in the emergency services, local authorities and some other public bodies and this post is addressed largely to them. You might want to come a long for the ride.

Planning for emergencies

So the job of an emergency planner is to plan for an emergency which is (in case you were wondering) any of these:

• an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom
• an event or situation which threatens serious damage to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom
• war, or terrorism, which threatens serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom

(from the Civil Contingencies Act 2004)

And they will have a series of plans covering situations like flooding, widespread power failure or pandemic influenza. The broad framework of these plans is usually pretty simple (complexity is pretty-much to be avoided when it all goes pear-shaped). There will be a trigger to activate the plan, a standby phase, an activation phase and a recovery phase. Much of the plan will identify what people and resources are needed for each phase, where they normally are and where they should be during this phase. There will be mention in the plan of how to communicate with the general public. I’d like to suggest that emergency plans could keep up more effectively with where modern communications are going.

Triggers

Information is needed to trigger a plan. Sometimes this information is reliable and from an extremely reputable source. If the Environment Agency say that the River Severn has broken its banks, you probably don’t need independent verification. If the police receive a phone call saying there’s being a massive explosion then they are probably going get some more information before triggering a mass evacuation.

Could social media play a role in triggering an emergency response? If there is a massive explosion in a town centre you can bet that within minutes pictures will be whirling around the twitterverse. This should carry at least as much weight as someone dialling 999. Should 999-responders and local authorities be monitoring social media sites for emergency triggers? I’m inclined to think they should and, short of that, they should certainly monitor this space for additional information once they’ve received a trigger.

Standby

Good organisations go to standby an awful lot. It’s good practice for one thing. If in doubt go to standby because you can always stand down in half an hour.They don’t usually make a big song and dance because they don’t want to worry anyone. The emergency plan will have a check-list of things to be done on standby. Wake up the chief executive, open the emergency control centre, contact a series of staff and ask them to get ready to stop whatever they are doing and do this instead.

I think that the checklist should include the following items:

• designate a #tag for this incident
• announce on appropriate social media platforms that the organisation is aware of the incident and is standing by, ask people to use the designated #tag
• listen out on social media for information about the incident and respond to questions and concerns in real time
• collate all social media feeds in the opps centre

Activation

At this point, something quite bad will have happened and the public bodies (Cat 1 Responders as they call themselves) will be working hard to try to make sure it doesn’t get worse. If it is going to get worse, they will be trying to minimise the impact on people and the environment.

Once the emergency plan kicks in, it will no doubt include an item triggering an emergency communications plan. Emergency Planners, in my experience, like to see their in-house comms staff as a nice safe buffer between the people managing the emergency and the media. I’m not sure this was ever a sensible way to behave but I’m convinced that in the 2st century it is unsustainable.

Social media has several roles to play

• it can be a very useful way of getting information out in a timely fashion
  People who use social media really use it. That’s where they are, if you want to tell them to stay in doors and close the windows you have to do it there. Not to the exclusion of other media of course but as part of the mix.
• it will still have an important role to play in getting reports in about the emergency
  Rumour, odd reports, speculation all fly around emergencies. Emergency planning training in the UK focuses pretty heavily on ways to process this data and turn it in to useful intelligence upon which some decisions can be made. Social media adds to the volume of that mix but also to its richness with audio, video and photographs all available in an easily accessible form.
• it can be used to mobilise resources not simply the “We need 4×4s and drivers” but also “please check on your neighbours”
  Barrack Obama used facebook to get his supporters to get out his vote. We could do the same. If we needed to.
• it can also provide data and even information that is not easily available any other way
  There is something beautiful about the uksnow map.  This examines twitter for the #tag #uksnow and then extracts simple information to map the movement of snow across the UK. It’s a proof of concept you would probably not use it to plan a military operation. You could set up a map of your county ready to pull information out of the twitterverse. You could display reports of road closures due to surface water flooding (data that is very hard to get in any other way). People could spoof the system but would they? And in reverse you could use the same system to map information only from your own twitter feed. So if you open rest centres they could be automatically mapped for everyone to see.

Recovery Phase

This is the phase of most interest to local authorities who, in the way of these things, have the responsibility for looking after people and cleaning up. That can take a long time, I mean years. Emergency plans already cover issues such as how to provide practical and emotional support to large numbers of people affected by a serious emergency.

It is already common for facebook groups to spring up after emergencies to rally support for public appeals or (in the case of Raoul Moat) for less pleasant reasons. The emergency plan should anticipate this and indicate how the organisations involved should begin to respond. This is not about publishing the location of the Humanitarian Assistance Centre on your council facebook page (though clearly you should do that) it is about using the technology to understand people’s wants and needs.

And finally

Emergency Plans are plans for organisations that help them to manage their response. The wider public will be doing all sorts of things while this is going on and they will be doing it, increasingly, on social media platforms. The flow of comment and opinion and information there can’t be controlled by anyone. Public bodies can make sure that their accounts are authoritative and trusted but that can’t be done on the fly. If you want your facebook account to be trusted in an emergency that happens in 18 months time you need to start building that trust right now.

Social media opens up organisations, they become more porous, information slips out and moves around speedily. Lots of people get involved in managing emergencies and all of them will have mobile phones and (on current figures) half of them will have social media accounts. You cannot stop this back-channel and it’s not sustainable to ignore it. Emergencies will have to be managed much more transparently than we are used to.

I know that proper emergency planners are shaking their heads silently. They worry a lot about the resilience of communications (they like pen and paper, land-line and satellite telephones and big generators). Social media is remarkably susceptible to failure. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be in the plan but it does mean we should not rely on it. But actually that’s the case for all media.

Photo used under a Creative Commons Licence the original is here

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