Use of Social Media in Risk and Crisis Communication (or what high-level management, most likely non-Social Media practitioners, might want to working on when it comes to social media and crises)

I am reading articles on technology and public policy because one day I want to do a PhD on this stuff. To make sure I read the articles, I'm summarising what I remember here and filing it under 'professional stuff' in my labels. The parenthetical statements are usually mine while the rest is where I try to accurately represent what I took from the article.

Title: The Use of Social Media in Risk and Crisis Communication

Authors: Cécile Wendling, Jack Radisch, Stephane Jacobzone at the OECD

 (The image has nothing to do with the blog. I just thought it was pretty.)

This paper targets high-level decision-makers and academics who are probably not too hands-on when it comes to social media. The authors themselves don't seem to spend a lot of time on the everyday, mainstream, non-crisis (till there is a crisis) tools of social media but do spend a significant amount of time researching those that do. (And they make me totally want to take this class with TechChange.)

The paper looks at the effective use and potential challenges of social media in risk and crisis communication.

• Risk communication is generally categorised as communicating about potential and past crises and seeking to educate those that were, are, could be involved so that they are better prepared. 
• Crisis communication is categorised more as communicating useful and verified information in a time of immediate and present danger. 

The paper points out the bottom-up nature of social media in risk and crisis communication, noting that government can take one of three approaches in its inevitable response:

1. Foster existing 'volunteer technology communities' made up of tech-savvy citizens already doing a lot of work in this area. 
2. Format government-lead social media strategies.
3. Combine the two approaches above. 

The paper goes through and categorises types of social media, highlights the fact that senior-level managers are not always the primary users of social media, lists several best practices (with examples) and finishes with a few obvious challenges that social media in crisis communication (and elsewhere) faces or will face soon-ish.

Below I'll summarise these different sections as best I understand them and run through the best practices and challenges. (The only best practice I felt was missing, based on the introduction, was the need to empower actual practitioners familiar with social media with the ability to participate in related problem-solving - rather, the checklists provided tend to focus exclusively on management, who may or may not be familiar with the technology and the online communities involved.)

5 categories of social media

(When reading this, I thought the categories were interesting, but do remember that few tools exist strictly in one category or another - many are, at times, hybrids of 2 or 3 or 4 or 5). 

• Social networking - exist to form networks / communities of common interests, e.g. Facebook or MySpace
• Content-sharing - exist to share content with others, e.g. YouTube, Flickr
• Collaborating/Knowledge-sharing media - exist to share knowledge (as opposed to interests?) such as wikis or podcasts. 
• Volunteer technology communities - used for risk and crisis communications more than other categories, e.g. Ushahidi or Sahana. This category includes:
• mapping collaboration, e.g. Crisis Mappers
• online and on-site contribution, e.g. Ushahidi, Sahana, Geeks without Bounds
• Public-private-people partnership, e.g. Random Hacks of Kindness

All of these categories can be used in crisis communications. 

Why social media?

Well, behavioural changes are achieved more easily via personal communication (Nudge is cited, great book, great blog.) Plus, surveys suggest that people want more communication via social media in times of crisis i.e. get alerts via SMS or RSS (social media sort-of), tend to communicate a lot about crisis events via social media, and tend to consider social media a viable way of contacting authorities when traditional methods are difficult to come by or not easy to contact. 

Also, VTCs (volunteer technology communities) are flattened decentralised group s within which decision-making and conflict resolution can bypass (sometimes for good, sometimes not) traditional bureaucracies. In addition, government employees or emergency personnel have noted that in some situations social media is a more effective way of reaching a necessary public than via traditional media sources. (Here I started laughing a bit as I just finished 'This Town' by Mark Leibovich, a tongue-in-cheek indictment of traditional media in DC if there ever was one.)

Some great examples to learn from when it comes to using social media for risk and crisis communication

Examples of government use of social media in a crisis includes the USA's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) who, via Twitter, communicates essential and targeted information to each of the specific regions different arms of FEMA oversee; the European Union's MASSCRISCOMM, which boasts a three-armed response to any crisis in the EU consisting of operators who respond to public demand via all channels and transmit appropriate information to authorities, monitoring and alarm functions that detect anomalies worthy of investigation, an editorial team that assists authorities in elaborating and updating FAQs and creating targeted information for important communities in a crisis and perform quality assurance; the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) in Chicago which used social media to collect and organise volunteers during a flood; Ushahidi, which mapped crises in Kenya and Haiti using social media and SMS; X24 Exercises, which runs regular scenarios combining individuals from government, the private sector, civil society, military, etc. to see how they could effectively organise online in a crisis; Australian Alert SA portal, which combines social media output from official Australian emergency sources.

Best practices to implement when it comes to using social media for risk and crisis communication

• Raise awareness about risks and crises before they happen so people know what to do. 
• Canada uses an awareness week in early May to spread pre-planned and validated social media content designed to educate the public about public safety practices. 
• The USA uses Hurricane week to do the same.
• The US Centre for Disease Control uses e-cards to educate people about the flu and other diseases. 
• Surveillance, monitoring, and situational awareness are important. 
• Using technical data-mining, crowd-sourcing and trend tools plus volunteers, Empowering the Public with Information in a crisis (EPIC), tweaks public social media to send out verified information. 
• In the Netherlands, Twitcident filters Twitter for real-time intelligence on crises. 
• Improve preparedness through monitoring (above) and individualised communication.
• Kenya uses mobile SMS to organise blood drives and find specific blood type donors when a certain type was lacking. 
• World Health Organisation, Strategic Health Operations Centre, staffed 24/7, found Japanese encouraging self-medication via iodine during the tsunami/nuclear crisis. Realising this social media trend could be dangerous to Japanese citizens, WHO staff jumped in via social media and encouraged citizens to ignore this bad advice. 
• Provide information and warning when possible - and remember to let information flow both ways and to validate information that comes in via reliable sources prior to spreading it.
• FEMA paid close attention to what disaster victims asked for and needed, communicated with private sector store owners, and provided victims with updated maps on where they could go for food and other needed supplies. 
• Improve crisis response through mobilising volunteers. Empower and connect large numbers of volunteers who may have critical information and who can respond (online and off-line) to the crisis. 
• The Louisiana Bucket Brigade used photos of oil-soaked birds posted by sympathetic citizens to maps to help prioritise where to send clean-up crews.
• In New Zealand, during the Christchurch quake, citizens set up a Facebook page to help co-ordinate volunteers seeking to help victims. 
• Identify survivors and victims.
• Safeandwell.org allows users to register themselves as 'out of danger' and facilitates finding family members in a time of crisis. 
• During the tsunami/nuclear crisis in Japan, photos posted to Picasa of evacuation centres helped family members find each other.
• In South Korea, some public emergency services are now allowing citizens to contact them via social media. 
• Manage the reputation of the emergency / disaster relief services involved.
• Ensure you quash false rumours and respond to real ones with clear and verifiable information. 
• Provide incentives to collect funding (usually done post-disaster). 
• The Red Cross is great at this. 
• Improve post-crisis learning and analysis. 
• Social media is time-stamped and does not disappear immediately after the crisis. It can help construct a timeline and allow for post-crisis analysis of what worked and what can be improved. Plus, a lot of it is free (though the time and expertise required to analyse it is not.)
• Improve partnerships and co-operation at the (local), national, international levels as well as among public sector and private sector players. 
• Communicating risk is as important as communicating a crisis. Long-term partnerships ensure sustainable communication (both financially and with regard to ensuring you provide timely, consistent, and reliable/verifiable communication on relevant issues).
• Health partnerships provide good examples of this, as does the UN Global Pulse. 
• Build trust over time so it is there when you need it.
• Develop long-term communities and networks, engage members of these networks and communities, share timely information and facts that they need/want to hear. 
• Enhance recovery management.
• Ensure continuity by sending information on reconstruction and recovery as well as stress management after the initial crisis period is over. 

Challenges of using social media in crisis and risk communication

• How to organise the range of players and channels when it comes to social media: principle of subsidiarity (plug for my first Masters)? multichannel outreach? centralised (good luck with this one...social media is not particularly friendly to centralisation...unless you are a celebrity)?
• Transparency and reliability.
• Explain the risks. (We are all a little more gullible in cyberspace). 
• Promote validated accounts. 
• Recognise social media cannot really be controlled, so build your networks and verify your sources and information.
• Don't forget - not everyone is on social media. Use traditional outlets to inform those not online as well. 
• Information overload (or, really, filter failure)
• Install filters (both technical and manual - every great analytics tool merits a great analyst or you are just losing money...)
• Privacy and confidentiality
• (This is one related to the thesis of my second Masters, an LLM in Economic Law.)
• Mobilise your legal experts (but remember the online world is not constrained by geography.)
• Pay attention to the delicate balance of regulation vs. innovation.
• A much-cited example: The Netherlands. Legally it is okay to monitor large data sets but not to target private individuals for surveillance. (Did the NSA listen in on Mark Rutte's phone calls?)
• Liability.
• Get your internal validation process clear. 
• Managing public expectations (harkens back to 'how to organise').
• Yes, setting up social media is easy. Maintaining it is not too difficult, but it requires clear guidelines and time. In the private sector in the USA, people expect responses on Twitter and Facebook in under a day - often in under an hour. Can government keep up? Make sure your network and community members (and staff, please) are clear on what you can and cannot do and in what time frame. 
• Social media can be more efficient than traditional phone / email communication. Instead of answering the same question a million times, you answer a million people (with the same question) once or twice.
• Security.
• What is okay to share (up-to-date information on the location of food?) and what is not (names of victims?). Determine this ahead of time and communicate the guidelines to everyone. 
• Impact assessment.
• The report notes this is not perfect yet. (In my experience, picking your metrics is not too hard once you are clear on your objectives.) The combination of web analytics and surveys helps. 

In short, social media is prevalent in risk and crisis communication and, leveraged effectively, can be very beneficial. Check out the checklists to see if your organisation is up to the task.