social media

The Greater Wellington Regional Council of New Zealand has commissioned a best-practices guide to using social media in a disaster. The paper is broken up into three phases dealing with the use of social media before, during, and after a disaster. It's worth taking a read: http://www.gw.govt.nz/social-media

Today my twitter stream lit up with the announcement of a cooperation between Dell and the American Red Cross to set up operations centers to manage social media services to prepare and respond to disasters. While it's not a new idea to put a few computers and volunteers in an operations center to help communicate with the public and gather information, this represents a new stage of maturity for social media in meeting the disaster-response mission.

I read a great interview last year on how the Red Cross and the LA Fire Department use twitter for gathering information about an emerging disaster situation. Take a visit to http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/03/social-media-red-cross-lafd.html and watch the short interviews. Brian Humphrey performs a much needed, but often un-staffed, role in disaster response that I call Disaster Intelligence. In our networked age, a tremendous amount of data floods in and can overwhelm the disaster response manager.