Crisis Communication Becoming Locally Global

Posted on May 18, 2009
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The best laid plans of corporate and governmental communicators for providing – and controlling – information during a crisis are being undone by the growing use of social media.

People building personal networks on Twitter, Facebook, Craigslist, Flickr and other social media today would be turning to them tomorrow to ask questions and spread information should a crisis strike.

They could quickly get ahead of the official information purveyors, especially if the official folks are located far from the scene – like the operators of the Three Mile Island nuclear power station, who have chosen to move the plant’s media center 60 miles away.

Such thoughts are reinforced by an article in the January, 2009, issue of Nature, “Crisis Communication, Messages appear on Internet-based social networks within minutes of disasters occurring…”

Science writer Lea Winerman notes that federal and local disaster response agencies who trained under the “top down” approach are now having to consider a far more distributed information system. And they had better plan to be in the midst of it, not miles, or counties, away.

‘How do you convince people that they are at risk?,” asks Dennis Mileti, a disaster-management researcher at the University of Colorado. “Only through other people.” And now, notes Winerman, there is the Internet to extend their reach. Using email and social media you can check in with people from the neighborhood or the globe. They’re all as close at hand as your computer screen.

And probably quite reliably so. During one series of California wildfires, researchers monitored social media sites. They had already discovered that national news websites ignored much of what was going on and that “the county so-called emergency site was always crashed.”

Local media sites, though, provided updates from “any local resident and an Internet connection and information to share.” The same kind of thing has occurred during earthquakes in China, Winerman notes.

Being envisioned is a web-based “‘community response grid’ that would combine the power of social networking sites with official government emergency-response systems.” While such an inclusive grid may be a ways off, the potential for sharing scraps or whole scenarios of information is growing rapidly.

Don’t forget, Winerman writes at the start of her article, students on the campus of Virginia Tech had already identified all 32 of Seung-Hui Cho’s 2007 massacre victims online by the time the university released their names a day later.

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