Social Media 4 Emergency Management

Creative Commons via openattitude.com

This isn’t a personal question, but rather a question about the data and information that you share as a public safety agency. There is a lot of lip-service given to being open and transparent, but it goes beyond just answering any question that is presented to your agency.

Are you proactively sharing information that the public can consume in order to be better prepared to face emergencies?

Openly sharing information isn’t just about telling other people to be prepared through sites like www.Ready.gov, but rather being open about your plans, expectations & assumptions of public behavior, research-based strengths and weaknesses. And, in today’s day & age, it also means considering how open your data streams are for public consumption.

Google.Org has put together a great list of considerations for First Responder agencies about how to prepare your agency to open up its data for emergency consumption.  It’s title is How Your Information Can be Quickly & Widely Distributed in a Crisis.

This article is worth a read and a few moments of your time to consider how your ready your online presence is to share key information with your jurisdiction and its key stakeholders.

Creative Commons via blog.volunteerspot.com

Not only has National Volunteer Week just ended, but today is also Earth Day. Why are these two concepts important? Because volunteers no longer provide face-to-face service, but the realization is growing that digital volunteers can provide an incredible service to emergency managers across the globe.

The Earth Day theme of “Mobilize the Earth” should be something that every emergency manager considers when they evaluate how to manage the burgeoning flow of information during crisis.

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to participate, as a digital volunteer, to support Oklahoma during their threatening tornado weather.  After receiving a tweet from the leader of the OKVOST team for additional assistance, I assembled a team of other other volunteers who focused on the following missions:

• Retweet/Share official information from a set of “official sources.”  In this situation, we were provided with a specific Twitter account to use to retweet and share information.
• Look for inaccurate information within Twitter and seek to correct info in a timely manner.
• Collect damage assessment pictures or links.
• Provide an archive of two hashtags.

It was a lot of fun to work on this incident.  We watched the localized National Weather Service Chat, compared that to livestreamed media reporting and watched the messages make their way to Twitter.  The situation was very dynamic and information that was merely 5 minutes old was being outdated by newer and fresher information.

Our team of 7 folks worked from about 5p on Saturday until 2a on Sunday morning PST.   I owe a huge debt of gratitude to team members Bill Smith (@emrgncytraffic), Joanna Lane (@joannalane), Marlita Reddy-Hjelmfelt (@theredelm), Scott Reuter (@sct_r), Chris Hall (@thefiretracker2), and Pascal Schuback (@schuback).  Thanks to John Butler (@okcalvin) and Lloyd Colston (@kc5fm) for asking us to help.  And thanks to Christine Thompson (@redcrossmom) for some Sunday morning assistance to locate additional damage pictures.

Through this experience, I learned some key lessons that might be helpful to others:

If you are a Virtual Team Leader:

• Clarify the mission needs in advance of activating the team.  Because people are interested in the activation, you could find more than one person communicating with the person activating the team.  Retain clear lines of communication between the person requesting the team and the leader of the virtual team.

• Institute a data collection process early in each incident even if you are only tasked with monitoring social media.  You don’t want to tread the same ground repeatedly when team members come & go during a mission.

• Ensure that your data collection process has a “parking lot” for capturing lessons learned.  It’s much harder to recall them after the incident if you haven’t made many notes during the incident.

• Begin thinking about the shift schedule right away.  Even if you are trained to work 12-hour in-person shifts, working on a computer offers a different level of eye strain and dynamic situations can wear someone down easily in 4-6 hours.  Ensure that your team is taking breaks and begin recruiting for replacements, even if they are not needed, so that folks can stay fresh and alert during an emergency.

• Be attentive to time-zone differences.  In this situation, information was moving so quickly that we found ourselves encouraging the public to put timestamps on tweets.  And, because few of our team members were from the actual crisis time-zone, we found it difficult at times to keep our own times straight on tweets.

• Pre-Affiliate with an Emergency Operations Center or Incident Management Team before a crisis occurs.  If the efforts of your team are not integrated into the emergency response or recovery, it could be arguable as to whether your activities are truly being helpful.  You may still be citizens-helping-citizens, but you may not actually amplifying the messages that could be helpful to your local emergency responders.

If you are an Emergency Manager or Incident Commander, preparing to use a digital team:

• Know where you want your information to go inside of the emergency response.  Are you aiming for integration into the response or recovery phase of your incident?  If you are aiming for response-level integration, be sure that your Planning and PIO protocols include & assume a virtual support team.

• Think, in advance, about the types of tasks & missions that you would like the digital team to complete.  The more information that you can provide the team leader, the better results you will achieve in its activation.

• Identify an in-house liaison to your virtual team.  Having an on-site person who is seeing what is occurring inside the Emergency Operations Center or incident will help guide and clarify what your virtual team is seeing from their vantage point.

• Ensure that your EOC is preaffiliated with a virtual team.  Whether you grow a team yourself or you have a regional team in place, know who and how you can reach out and activate your local team.

• Consider what pre-staged resources you might want to have in place that might be useful to a virtual off-site team.  Are there key resources you use regularly for protective action messaging or official accounts that you may want a virtual team to manage during the incident?

• Follow up with your virtual team after the incident to identify and incorporate the lessons learned from each response.  With social media evolving and changing as quickly as it does, virtual team support changes as well with each incident that occurs.

There are a number of groups that are actively developing digital support teams.  They include:

• Virtual Operation Support Teams (#VOST on Twitter)
• Crisis Commons
• Red Cross Digital Operations
• Standby Task Force
• Humanity Road

The challenge for each of these groups will be to develop, nurture and deploy virtual assistance that is known, able to activate in a timely manner upon request, provide predictable outcomes, possesses relevant skills and can be easily incorporated into any disaster response.

Having been a participant observer of a VOST team during the SMEM Camp in 2011, an activator of a virtual team to support my #140ConfNW and team leader this past weekend, it is exciting to see the growth and skill sets that can be made available to an emergency manager if they have key relationships in place.

If you are an emergency manager who is still “on the fence” about social media, I will suggest that trying to figure out how to obtain social media support during your crisis is the last thing you will want to do and yet, it could be your lifeline to your public’s perception of your response and a community that could more easily take care of itself if only you engage with it.

Have you ever wandered into a room where everyone was talking, but there seemed to be little actual conversation going on?

This past Friday, an interesting phenomenon occurred during our #SMEMChat hour. Many of us descended on the chat, but there were a number of topics proposed & questions asked, but I found it personally very difficult to engage. Perhaps I had a unique experience; however, the conversation just never quite jelled for me.

I’ve participated and moderated a number of chats over the past year. They start rather organically. Someone proposes a topic and usually prepares 4-6 questions relating to that topic and then usually, folks get to chatting and talking to each other and by the end of the hour, it seems there are a number of great threads of conversation.

But this past week never really took off. The TweetReach Report for Friday tells an interesting story, too. When I first pulled the report after the chat, the “highest number of retweets” was 1. The current report illustrates 2 (but that’s because the archive was shared following the chat).  For whatever reason, the original tweet ratio to replies & retweets was way off balance.  Lots of original tweets, but little actual engagement.

I always watch the #SMEMChat from two perspectives:

1. Am I getting something of value out of the conversation? (Like new ideas, tools or folks to follow), and
2. What would someone new to #SMEM get out of the conversation?

#SMEMChat is often the first exercise for new users on how to conversate on social media.  I regularly enjoy seeing someone tweet that they are visiting and watching to see how a conversation moves and flows over that hour each week.

Now before you think I’m launching in a personal criticism of anyone on Friday’s chat, I’d like us to consider what funny dynamics can occur when rooms become crowded.  I’m thrilled that the #SMEMChat has become popular, but it poses a unique risk that I believe requires all of us to pay heed to.

Consider for a moment, the difference of an intimate dinner with 4 friends as compared to walking or being pushed down Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras.  The more popular something becomes, the more each participant should be aware of the dynamics that can occur.

And for this reason, I think it’s important that we consider the following tips & tricks as we chat….

• If you have a topic idea for a chat, conversation sometimes starts on the #SMEMChat in the hour prior or even the day prior to confirm a topic.  Once the 12:30PM ET chat has begun, look through the tag to see if a topic is already in progress.  Presenting new topics after the chat has begun can be confusing to those already participating.
• If you are moderating or entering the chat, it’s always good to kick off a chat with a welcome & topic-defining tweet.
• It can also be helpful for moderators to use Q1, Q2, Q3 to designate moderated questions.  People who answer back may then be able to include A1, A2, A3 in order to connect answers to specific questions.
• If you are moderating the chat, prepare a few questions ahead of time so as to explore & advance a topic.  Just like an emergency exercise, consider where the conversation might head and try to anticipate a full conversation around your desired topic.  While it is fine to change the questions during a chat, it can be tough to moderate and steer a conversation around the sometimes large topics.
• Don’t be afraid to retweet those answers you like and reply to those answers that you disagree with or want more information about.  Starting conversations that spider off in a chat can be a lot of fun.
• Most importantly in every conversation, listen to those around you.  Watch for opportunities for dialogue and engage with folks.

An hour may seem like a really short amount of time and it can be very energizing to participate, but remember that not only are the #SMEM regulars talking, we have many who are trying to listen, monitor, watch and learn from the conversation, too.  My guess is we don’t want to look like a group of people, sitting around on megaphones, around the periphery of a party.  Rather, let’s work together to engage in weekly dialogue that is open, inviting and motivates all who participate.

Thanks for reading & listening! I look forward to this next Friday’s #SMEMChat with y’all.

Today, we have a guest post from Charles Heflin (aka @PatokaFire10a16 and @gibsoncounty411 on Twitter). Thanks, Charlie, for a great personal view of how to engage your local partners in #SMEM activities!

As a regular contributor to the world of Emergency Management through Social Media, I know there are a lot of individuals, across the nation, also attempting to get the word out through various social media platforms. However, I never realized how much it was occurring right here in my region. Until you really start to analyze what kind of local information is being disseminated, you may never realize all the #smem contributors right in your own back yard.

Throughout the past couple years, I’ve run a Facebook page entitled Gibson County Communique’. This site started as a simple page geared towards providing emergency management information for the residents in Gibson County. As the site continued to expand so did the requests from residents outside the Gibson County area. Before I knew it, I was reporting incidents for a five county area to over 7500 Facebook followers. I’ve since branched into two different pages in order to meet the requests of the membership that would like to see Gibson County “only” information on the Gibson County page.

Throughout the growth period I established relationships and opened lines of communications with a number of individuals throughout the Tri-State (SW Indiana, SE Illinois and NW Kentucky) region. These individuals were mostly on Twitter but some also ran Facebook sites that provided weather, traffic and other safety-related information. This group consisted of the local on-air meteorologists for the network stations, Skywarn Storm Spotters, Freelance meteorologists and writers to the “scanner-junkies”. More often than not, I found that we all frequently shared information individually as well as with our followers. I asked myself, what if we could harness this group and create a #smem “team”.

I decided to contact the Red Cross Chapter in Evansville and asked them if they would host a #smem workgroup meeting as this particular Red Cross Chapter was very active in the same social communications that we all participated in; especially during emergency situations. I asked approximately 25 of these “Tri-State Talkers” to join me for a 2-hour-long meeting to discuss how we could work together to get our message out in a timely and more accurate manner. Surprisingly, eighteen of these individuals came from four different counties to discuss my initiative. Not only had I geared this meeting towards the sharing of ideas but I also wanted to develop that “face-to-face” relationship that is lacking in the social media world.

After a brief round of introductions and the distribution of pizza and drinks, I provided the group with an overview of the Social Media for Emergency Management (SM4EM) initiative. I was surprised to see how many individuals had never heard of #smem but participated in some of its basic concepts on a daily basis. The ideas and suggestions that were being brought to the floor never seemed to stop. Over the next two hours we not only developed group mailing lists but Twitter lists and established foundations for additional data-sharing partnerships. Not only had the attendance to this meeting surpassed my expectations but the enthusiasm and desire to expand on this newly-created workgroup, as well as combine our efforts so that a much larger following of social media fans in the Tri-State region, would benefit from our vision. I am currently in the process of scheduling at least two more meetings for 2012; one possibly being a day-long, multi-faceted seminar.

So I ask this question to the other #smem trailblazers out there, “Have you looked in your own backyard to recruit individuals for your #smem efforts?” This meeting not only allowed me to see the desire others have to make their community a safer place but the ability for pure strangers to “network” with each other to build on common goals. Since our first meeting, I have had a number of individuals ask to be invited to the next meeting as well as portions of the original group looking forward to the next meeting. I have always considered social media as “people” and applications like Facebook and Twitter as the tools for disseminating our message; but no more did I see this, on display, that night when social media “strangers” established social friendships, all around a desire to help others.

About the author: Charles Heflin has over 25 years in emergency services. Currently he holds the position of Training Officer with his volunteer department in Patoka, Indiana. He is a state licensed EMT in Indiana. He’s currently a 4th-year student in the Bachelor of Homeland Security and Public Safety and Associate in Emergency Management and Planning programs at Vincennes University. He holds an Honor Associates Degree in Fire Science from Parkland College, in Champaign, Illinois. He is working towards his Professional Emergency Management certification through the State of Indiana Office of Homeland Security.

Did you catch all of the #SMEM Events this past week? There were so many big events that I’m not even sure I caught them all….but I shall attempt a summary anyway (and if I missed something, folks can let me know!)

The first event started on Sunday, March 25th, which was the SMILE Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. SMILE, which stands for Social Media in Law Enforcement, put on a busy conference which brought together a number of excellent speakers to talk about how emerging technologies are influencing the world of policing.

On Monday, March 26th, a one-day Social Media Forum was put on in Washington D.C. by iCERT which is the Industry Council for Emerging Response Technologies.

I was fortunate enough to watch the kick-off panel for this forum which included Kim Stephens (@kim26stephens), Clarence Wardell (@cwardell) and Jeff Phillips (@_jsphillips). They spoke eloquently to the issues of using social media in crisis and preparing to use volunteers to bolster curation, filtering and response efforts.

Next up on Monday, March 26th, was the #NEMA12 Social Media Panel which was a huge panel of speakers which included Christine Thompson (@redcrossmom), Greg Licamele (@g_r_e_g), Brian Crumper (@emgis), Rob Dudgeon (@sfDEMrob), Kim Stephens (@kim26stephens), James Hamilton (@disaster_guy) and was moderated by Jeff Phillips (@_jsphillips).

And if Monday wasn’t busy enough, Noah Reiter (@noahreiter) coordinated an #SMEMTweetUp which brought a number of other amazing #SMEM folks to town including Jim Garrow (@jgarrow), Kelly (@bos_klb), Todd Jasper (@toddjasper) and Kevin Sur (@rusnivek).

And Monday wasn’t over yet….in New York City, the Shorty Awards took place which had nominated several of our #SMEM Community members like @HumanityRoad, Scott Mills (@graffitibmxcop) and @NYFD for livesaving awards on Twitter. At the end of the awards ceremony, NYFD walked away with the win, but more social connections were made and all three of them deserve a kudos.

And finally, #SMEMTO took place on Thursday, March 29th. This was a social media in crisis conference in Toronto, Canada! Huge props to Canada for an incredible week in social media. This event also had a powerhouse line-up of social media speakers (and because I wasn’t there, I don’t want to risk missing out anyone special). But Patrice Cloutier (@patricecloutier) has already blogged about this event and Scott Mills did a Storify episode worth checking out.

This is clearly going to be the longest post ever….but, it’s exciting because of all of the great work folks are doing in the #SMEM Community. My hat is off to each and every person who spoke, tweeted, participated in our weekly livechat or even just shared about social media with a friend. You are all part of a community that is lively, focused on the future and are shaping key issues for the next generation.

In short…..you ROCK!

This week, emergency managers from all over the United States will convene on Alexandria, Virginia for the Mid-Year Conference of the National Emergency Management Association.

The conference materials are listed at this link.  And like last year, there will be a session on Monday afternoon that is focused on social media & emergency management.  This year, that panel will be moderated by Jeff Phillips (@_jsphillips) and will also include:

• Greg Licamele (@g_r_e_g)
• James Hamilton (@disaster_guy)
• Rob Dudgeon (@sfdemrob)
• Kim Stephens (@kim26stephens)
• Brian Crumpler (@emgis)
• Christine Thompson (@redcrossmom)
• Cheryl Bledsoe (@cherylble)

If you have spent any time in the world of Twitter, you should recognize all of these names quite easily.  It should be a fun panel and provide some great conversation at this conference.

In addition, pay special attention to the Twitter hashtag #NEMA12 as it will, hopefully, be full of valuable information on other topics that are discussed at this year’s conference.  And, if you’re attending the conference, don’t be shy about sharing information as well.  You have the ability to make the conference fun and lively be open discussing the issues of importance to emergency managers.

Creative Commons via langwitches.org

It’s hard to believe that the Social Media in Emergency Management conversation on Twitter just passed its 16 month anniversary.

You can often find the conversation by watching it in the column on the right hand side of this website, searching for #SMEM at www.twitter.com or at www.monitter.com if you don’t yet have a Twitter account.

Earlier today, someone asked the question about where it all began….

So, I thought it might be interesting to share the original Pirate Pad on which a number of us “old timers” talked for the first time. Before this conversation occurred, I didn’t even know what a Pirate Pad was. The original #SMEM Conversation can be found by clicking on this Pirate Pad link.

It’s fun to scroll back through this collaborative conversation and see who was there, what we talked about and the number of ideas that have come to fruition over the past 16 months including the #SMEMCamp which occurred at the NEMA Mid-Year Conference,  #140Conf NW in 2011 and seeing several of our colleagues speak at TEDX Conferences like Sara Estes Cohen and Heather Blanchard.

This week, as we watched the grand opening of the American Red Cross Digital Operations Center sponsored by Dell, we can already tell that 2012 is going to be a banner year for the engagement of emergency services professionals and volunteers in the world of social media.

People are already communicating and sharing their thoughts about how to support local and international crisis response.  Are you listening?

Creative Commons via roogio.com

This was a tough week for many in the emergency management community with a large number of tornadoes hitting the Midwest and the Southern part of the United States. And beyond the severe weather, other tragic stories included school shootings in Ohio and train derailments and crashes in Canada and Poland.

As agencies continue to learn how to use social media, many conversations could be seen across Twitter & Facebook this past week which commented on the quality of the response agencies involved.

On the positive side, it was nice to see state-level Twitter accounts pointing people to the active local Twitter accounts, sharing situational reports and personal protective actions. We also saw rail agencies working on being directly responsive to the community questions. It is important to remember that many agencies are still learning how to improve their social media interactions and marked improvements are evident in nearly every new incident.

It’s easy to perceive or speculate on failures or needed improvement among public agencies and their use of social media. For those who use social media on a regular basis, jumping to judgment or conclusions about failures to adopt social media can forget a few basic things:

• Agencies may be actively working on implementing social media, but may be facing internal hurdles that are difficult to see from the outside.
• Public agencies can’t all share the same information. They are often limited to speak for their role in the emergency coordination. For example, local city or county emergency management agencies often have the most specific jurisdiction over alert & warning information while state-level agencies may be able only give the statewide damage assessment picture or snapshot of who has emergency declarations.

As individuals who use social media, we have a responsibility as well that includes:

• Encouraging new agencies in their social media journey.  If you want more information from public agencies and you see ways that they could share better information, suggest ideas in a supportive or encouraging manner.

• RT (or share) good information that both they and others are sharing.  Include the public agency as an @mention within the share so that they may be able see what your are sharing in a positive way.  This is an easy form of mentoring and sharing things with the emergency management agency that they might not be aware of.

• If you have something critical to say, take it offline.  You can encourage use of a hashtag or share other thoughtful ideas through email or direct message.  Berating an agency during an emergency response incident is not only unprofessional, but illustrates a profound lack of etiquette especially if you are a heavy consumer or user of social media.  No one likes to be challenged or belittled in front of others face-to-face and the same holds true in social media.

We’ve all heard it said that our vision is always 20/20 when we look back.  We can always speculate on what we could have, would have, should have done differently.  And, on an every day basis, many agencies are using these real-time incidents to do just that and improve their online presence.

Social media implementation is not a dead-end road.  It is a journey with many destinations that include response, preparedness, mitigation and recovery.  Let’s encourage each sign of visible progress rather than risk discouraging or disheartening any public agency on their travels.

Creative Commons

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) announced a social game on February 24, 2012 which offers $40,000 to find Quick Response codes (also known as QR Codes) that identify certain resources throughout the United States by 12:00 p.m. EST on March 8, 2012.

The rules of the game are listed here: https://www.cliqrquest.com/

Although this game aims to test social networks, the presence of a cash prize seems to demotivate people from sharing information throughout the game and on their public networks.  Do you have a theory? Are you playing on a team?

I’ll admit that I’m sucked in and I’m not alone.  But we would love to join forces with others who might be playing, too.  We’ve got a Google Doc developing with our research to date.

My teammates and I have decided that if we were to win this cash prize, we’d donate the full $40K to charity to support groups doing excellent community-based work in the areas most recently ravaged by tornadoes in Alabama and Indiana.

There are 6 days left.  If you want to join our team and test your ability to relentlessly pursue random theories, watch for clues and put a fresh set of eyes on our work, there are several ways you can join our team:

• Tweet your interest in joining to #CliqrSMEM (We will not accept egg profiles or suspicious spammer-looking profiles)
• Connect with me on Skype via cherylble
• Email me at cherylble@gmail.com

This past Friday, we conducted a little situational awareness drill on Twitter entitled #SMEMWatch which asked participants to gather as much information as they could about the current state of the Occupy Movement across the world.  The following questions were asked:

• How many Occupy groups are actively camping in public places?
• How many Occupy groups are gathering and planning events, but not camping?
• What hashtags are in use?
• What social media platforms are being used to plan?
• What are the goals of the various Occupy movements?

Yes, this was the impossible task to complete in 2 hours, but it illustrates, like any emergency situation, that data will be readily available to those searching.  Unfortunately, the data will often conflict, be wrong and will require verification.  The challenge that quickly develops is: how much time do you have to validate information before decisions have to be made?

In the heat of any emergency, we can never seek a perfect answer to the “what” or “why” questions before the “how we respond” kicks into high gear.  Where we will have to get to, as an emergency management community, is how quickly we can evaluate and curate the data so that we can truly make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our communities.

Here are some key tips & tricks for monitoring social media:

• Don’t neglect the simple search engines at www.Google.com and www.Bing.com (searching key terms in both search engines may yield different results)
• Start with broad terms which will provide some hints about how to narrow down.  (For example, in this case, starting with searches on Occupy or Occupy Wall Street should have led to a number of crowd-sourced spreadsheets as a good starting point for this exercise.)
• Test hashtags to determine whether or not they truly are active.  You can do this at www.monitter.com or www.tweetgrid.com.  In this case, I was able to run many of the occupy hashtags and determine how old they were.
• Don’t work alone.  Find several partners, friends, trusted agents, other emergency managers and share the workload.  Working with a large amount of data will give you a headache within just a few hours.  To truly be sure that you’re getting solid information, the more eyes, the merrier so that you can work together to get actionable results.

In this case, I was able to determine that there are approximately 34 Occupy Groups that were actively camping across the world and over 450 Occupy groups that are continuing to meet on a regular basis for planned activities.  The person who came closest to these results was Tony Lambreth of the @HELPFoundation.

Congratulations to all of the players in this exercise.  I am proud of every one of you who participated in this drill.  Your willingness to take on the impossible is truly noteworthy and should be applauded.  They are:

• Tony @HELPFoundation
• Cindy @getmeoutnews
• Bill @EmrgncyTraffic
• Jared @cfeaap
• Caroline @mm4marketing
• Pete @petehartmann
• Darrell @darrellruby
• Amanda @pioresearcher