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Energency and Twitter - Now the Quake

by Rob Paterson

I think now that the point is made - Twitter is currently THE BEST TOOL for communicating widely in an emergency

quake

(ParisLemon) Another day, another show of Twitter’s true power. Barely a week after the Southern California fires began and Twitter helped get out important messages to people, a 5.6 magnitude earthquake hits the Bay Area and info about is posted numerous times on Twitter before the ground is even done shaking. It’s barely been 30 minutes and already I have 4 solid pages of earthquake news and insight.

Ariel Waldman posted the first tweet about it (that I saw) and from there nearly ever blogger/tech geek/person in the entirity of the Bay Area has posted in on the quake - and many of the multiple times. I knew the exact location and magnitude before the story had even hit the news.

I say again, this is the power of Twitter.

Not only does it get your message out - but it uses very small amounts of the cell network and so can often get through when an overload crashes the system. Robert Scoble sent out a Twittergram to his list including Maryam his wife. With a Twittergram you can use voice. So you can in effect use the cell phone system without overloading it.
twittergram

I think that the ubiquity of cell phones means that any organization now can have a Twitter Emergency Strategy - you can of course link this to a complementing Facebook strategy too.

So imagine a fire in your office - or an epidemic in the school - or a shooter at your university - a flood in your region - with Twitter, you can reach most people affected and then you can keep them updated - all it requires is that you have a plan and get them following as a precaution. Not hard!


Social Media - News - The Fire - KPBS

by Rob Paterson

Here is a short but informative report by NPR on KPBS’s historic use of Social Media to cover the fire. One of the key Apps was “My Maps” -

mymapsgoogle

The Google map has had over 1.2 million hits and even the fire fighters used it as The Source. Google themlseves have been a huge help and gave support to KPBS as the load on the map increased.

kpbsmap

I think that the fire and KPBS’s work has been a watershed for public broadcasting - their work has shown that a small station with few staff can offer the public a huge service in an emergency.

More - it also shows universities who are all struggling to find a process to help their own communities in an emergency such as the recent shootings can do so in an affordable manner.