The Influence Of Social Media On Emergency Management

In lieu of recent natural disasters like hurricanes Harvey, Jose, and Irma, people have been using social media as a way of a relief effort. Social media had been used as many things, but no one had really used it to provide relief efforts for natural disasters. This really started happening in 2017. People have started to use social media to help people that have been affected by the natural disaster. In today's society, social media and its effect on aiding people in natural disasters is overall a positive thing.

Social media, nowadays, undoubtedly plays a significant role during and after a crisis. It not only allows people to capture the onsite image in a disaster immediately without having reporters, for example, drive several miles from a TV station with the possibility of wasting precious time because of the traffic, but also enables people to gather valuable information

29). During the Japanese Earthquake, twitter users sent tweets about their experiences, highlighting damage that had been caused, sending pleas, and asking others to let them know what had happened (Cho et al, 2013, p. 29). The Queensland flooding saw similar activity, with users retweeting important information and using hash tags to raise awareness (Bruns, Burgess, Crawford, & Shaw, 2012, p. 23). This demonstrates both communication and collaboration in the way that people are sending information to inform others about events, asking users to keep them updated on new information, and retweeting from others to relay messages and information to a broader audience. Therefore, this signifies a change, as people are no longer waiting for the mainstream media to gain information, but are rather taking the matters into their own hands and being active participants when both communicating and collaborating, especially during times of

For mitigation, planning and response of disasters emergency managers rely heavily on communication. Communication is a major part of existence, people are a part of societies and groups and therefore do not live by isolation. Communication comes in many forms and is used to spread information or ideals among the other members of societies. Emergency managers rely on communication in order to efficiently and effectively manage disasters. By using strong communication with other agencies, governments and communities, emergency managers are able to effectively create and act upon policies and procedures. Communication helps emergency managers understand what it is that needs to be improved upon or changed in order to effectively protect against

The response phase is to communicate information to the public on important matters concerning the ongoing crisis. Several of these notifications can be achieved through partnering with the media to disseminate evacuation routes, warnings and immediate information on the event itself. Seemingly, the response phase cannot be made without the cooperation of emergency management professionals, the media, the private sector, nonprofit organizations and first

This emergence of social media has also changed emergency management and disaster response. Emergency management as a whole is fairly new, only creating widely recognized, integrated emergency management systems beginning in the 1970s. Furthermore, at this same time people realized that the effects disasters have on the communities they strike can be mitigated by the creation of disaster plans ahead of time, proper disaster response training, and the efforts of human actions in these situations. Because social media has enabled mass amounts of instant information sharing, it allows not only locals and disaster response teams to help with the management of crises, but also many remote citizens.

Paren (2008) gives an example of Virginia Tech shooting where by social media users provided a list of the victims even before an official list could be released. During a crisis, social media plays an important role in disseminating information where information breakers inform the public and the stakeholders of an event of interest. For example, a flooding may swipe away a bridge and an information breaker could use social media to inform other motorists of the crisis. It is however worth noting that social media as with other forms of communication has been used to spread rumors in times of crisis and it is important for the crisis management team to closely monitor social media and squash any rumors (TFCC, 2013).

In a new form of protection and communication, social media is the main thing that everything is using in today’s times. Marketing employees have positions as titled as social media directors. Companies have people watching and monitoring everything that happens with their social media reputation all hours of the day everyday. Young people are seeing the power of social media everyday with teachers demonstrating how fast a picture can be shared across the world. Social media is relatively new and could possibly open many gates for communication. This depends heavily on who is publishing information and news on social media. If news spreads fast on social media, then the use of it can be used for emergencies. If many people are

Many people use social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to share information on numerous topics, ranging from politics, sports, and personal stories. This information has been collected and analyzed by researchers for market prediction, mining the opinions, etc. One of the most important properties of social platforms is that they allow people to communicate in real-time. During a crisis or a natural disaster, people on social media tend to easily believe contents of postings related to the events, and Re-tweet the postings with hoping them to be reached to many other users. There are both sides positive and negative to sharing information related to emergency situations on social media. People are well-informed about the situation in real-time, and most of this information is true, or believed to be true.

Regarding using social media for crisis communication, the unstable business environment created by a crisis may blur the boundary between internal and external stakeholders (Lerbinger, 1997). These groups may both be affected by a crisis and become intertwined. However, as indicated in the previous section, this present study is concerned more with the external than internal stakeholders. The author believes that external stakeholders do not have much access to a company’s information, and that therefore they could have an even greater craving for information than their internal counterparts. The external stakeholders that this study looks at are the customers and general audience, and during crises, victims and their associates. Victims may be customers of an organization before a crisis happens, and they become victims once they are harmed or affected. Combined with Mitchell et al.’s (1997) categories, since the main driving force of a crisis is urgency,

Social media is a broad term used to express an exhaustive list of many types of new media and forms of communication. It is a constantly evolving platform which has rapidly changed communication behaviours and practices. Over the past decade the role of the digital has radically altered the landscape of corporate communication and the ways in which an organisation establish dialogues with their stakeholders, particularly in the area of crisis communication. Social media’s characteristics of ubiquity, availability and immediacy allow information to be swiftly accessed anywhere at any time, therefore it is essential organisations react with the same swiftness when remedying a crisis. Through the evaluation of social medias role in a crisis, this essay will analyse Uber’s crisis management strategy on the Kalamazoo shootings, with a particular focus on their use of Twitter.

Social media, in particular Twitter, has been a major platform for these organizations and individuals to share with the world the experiences they are encountering daily. Using Twitter hashtags like #CAR and #CARcrisis allows for stories to be told and information to be released throughout the world. Individuals worldwide are becoming aware of the circumstances happening overseas by simply opening their Twitter account, and not just from mainstream news sources.

Crisis according to Laura (2013, p. 51), can be defined as any situation that threatens harms or cause panic among people. Crisis may occur due to accidents, war, and flood or fire attack. During this period, the public, who may be affected by the crisis because they are found in the situation or their next of kin are involved in it, rely on a lot of information that is relayed by the media. Because of this, the media must be careful of what they report. The information that the media convey to the public according to Laura (2013, p. 50) may cool the situation, and reduce the tension that has been built by the parties concerned. However, if they are not mindful of

Hello! Today I’m going to present my global perspective project called “How effective are social networks for disaster relief?” It becomes clear that following talk will be about social networks and disaster relief.

Social Media is used to provide information about a particular disaster and in turn receive feedback, messages, comments and posts from users. The use of social media as an emergency weapon for communication is increasing and readily available to post emergency information in turn receiving assistance requests from affected people, using images uploaded to estimate the damage caused and how to come to aid with these conditions.