The 21st World Conference on Disaster Management got underway in Toronto today with a program of half and full day workshops.
If you have not been to WCDM before, then you are missing one of the best education events in the industry. As they have been running for 21 years, that is not just my opinion.
I took the two half-day option. First up, and rather appropriately I guess, was a session about the use of Social Media.
Stephen Krill (pictured) and Bill DelGrosso led this workshop. You can find the session overview, and presenters bios, here.
The obligatory introductions by participants immediately highlighted one of the challenges of this session – the very diverse level of understanding of social media of the audience. Ranging from Dave Colvin and Ken Gisborne (who are both active about the conference on Twitter today) to a number of people who admitted to being in denial about the whole Social Media scene.
This was a good session to start the conference as the guys maintained a good level of dialog and with the audience, which as always means you tend to run out of time at the end.
Some key messages that arose from the conversations;
- It is not about the technology – very important part to remember.
- It is not just for the young folks – the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is women over 55.
- Many are looking at Social Media as a response tool, but you need to build the use and understanding through preparedness activities.
- This is not really something that you can just stand-up and start using properly when an incident occurs
- We may even need to consider different types and uses of Social MEdia tools in the different phases of the lifecycle
- The data we gather from Social Media channels may not be perfectly accurate – but then neither is the TV news coverage that we all rely on in Crisis/Emergency Ops Centres.
- This is not something that BC and EM people should be driving – and certainly not progressing alone
- This is another form of ‘on the record’ statements that can be attributed to our company or organisation – you need to ensure your PR or Corporate Comms folks are engaged
One very telling piece of evidence came from a survey result that was quoted (survey was sponsored by American Red Cross).
Over 75% of people responding to the survey expected to have a response to a message posted on a Social Media channel within 1 hour.
Clearly rapid response is a major issue for organisations like Red Cross. But how many other organisations out there are set up to monitor and respond in this way?
Too many are still blocking mainstream Social Media sites from their staff on the basis of security and/or time wasting.
One of the interesting trends in use of Social Media is integrating it with GIS and spatial systems to improve Situational Awareness. this is certainly one area that requires significant prior thinking and planning to exploit in a crisis.
Tools such as Open Street Map and Depiction were mentioned, but not much was discussed around platforms like Ushahidi. I think these kind of tools could have some interesting applications in Emergency and BC Management fields.
As often happens at these events some of the more interesting conversations occur outside the sessions. In this case continuing the discussion about social media with Chris Webb from New Zealand. Chris told me about the Student Army that was mobilised via Facebook in response to the Christchurch Earthquakes.
Social media talks about building a community around your channel – be that Twitter, Facebook or whatever. The first challenge is to promote and build that community in normal times, then you can exploit it to communicate in a crisis.
Have you thought about how to leverage these kind of ’emergent groups’ as either volunteers or a communication channel for your organisation?
Does your organisation have a policy and way forward to leverage Social Media?
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