Tweeting in an emergency

You hear about social networking all over the place: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, blogging. Your kids are doing it. Your neighbors are doing it. Maybe your parents are doing it.

Twitter founders Biz Stone, left, and Evan Williams pose for a photo at their office in San Francisco,  Jan. 29, 2009. Twitter Inc. revolves around riffing in messages limited to 140 keystrokes. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

Related Articles: MySpace links users to US hurricane emergency alerts FOX News: Rep. Hoekstra defends use of Twitter in Iraq, Afghanistan

But now even public agencies are discovering the benefits of the social networking craze to not only gather and disseminate information, but to help build trust among citizens who've become all too cynical in the face of government failures.

FEMA has a page on YouTube.com with several videos on various programs. The Los Angeles City Fire Department has a Twitter page and a blog where citizens can get updates on fires in the city, big and little. The Rhode Island and Washington State departments of transportation use Twitter to send out traffic alerts.

As Matt Williams, assistant editor for the Government Technology site, noted in a Jan. 7, 2009, article, Twitter, in particular, seems to leave no middle ground: Either you can’t live without it or you don't get it (though there are plenty of folks who get it, but hate it nonetheless).

There are different forms of social networking. Most people know about blogs, which are frequently updated Web pages featuring everything from professionally written articles and essays to banal musings put up for the fun of it. Newspapers and other companies have been sponsoring blogs for a few years now, including Disaster Zone, put up by consultant Eric Holdeman, who specializes in emergency management and homeland security issues for ICF International.

Websites such as Facebook.com, MySpace.com and even the more professionally oriented LinkedIn.com provide places where individuals can post profiles featuring photos and other information about themselves. The individual will then invite other members of the site to connect (become buddies, link to), so that when the individual makes a change or posts something, all the buddies get a little e-mail or note on their respective pages about the change.

Twitter, which launched a couple years ago and pretty much exploded in popularity, is a kind of cross between a blog and a Facebook page. The individual signs up and invites others to follow them. Then the individual posts short text notes, called tweets, from either their cell phones or their computers about what they are doing or whatever strikes them as interesting. As a result, Twitter has gotten something of a bad rep for encouraging the mundane, because who really wants to know that a friend started their second cup of coffee?

On the other hand, LAFD posts updates on structural and other fires so that folks following their page can stay abreast of what’s going on, including potential evacuations. According to the Williams article, the state of Washington DOT encourages its citizens to use Twitter to follow emergency updates, because when they all turn to the department’s Web site at the same time, it crashes from the overload.

In a piece on National Public Radio, LAFD spokesperson Brian Humphrey described using special software that allows him to search tweets (which are limited to 140 characters) for key words, including OMG (a texting abbreviation for “Oh My God”). When he sees a lot of OMGs from a specific area, he starts checking out the posts, which is how he and his department knew about the Interstate 35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis in 2007 before anyone else did.

In the same broadcast, Humphrey noted that during last year’s brush fire in Griffith Park, firefighters used tweets from citizens to keep abreast of where the flames were and were able to redirect resources to protect some homes that had been unknowingly left unprotected when the fire shifted.

Holdeman noted that Twitter, in particular, is very useful for gathering information as well as sending it out. Because Twitter works two ways (users can reply to tweets and send messages to other users they're connected to), responders can find out what's actually happening out in the field from a wider range of people. And because of its grassroots approach, citizens can also find out things that the media are not as likely to report with a certain immediacy.

For example, there was a flooding emergency in Pierce County, Wash., where Holdeman lives. A Twitter alert was put out that the county emergency management office was going to provide cots for workers in the offices. But because a lot of citizens were also following the EM office on Twitter, they too got the alert, a detail that normally wouldn’t be reported by the media.

"That does show the level of commitment of the government workers," Holdeman said, which reassured the citizens and built needed trust.

But he notes that even when there’s no emergency, social networking is still extremely useful. "I'm a strong believer in establishing relationships before the event happens," he said. "I've come to believe you can establish an electronic relationship which then leads to digital trust."

Holdeman conceded that concerns about security, for example, pranksters or other malicious sorts hacking into an agency account and sending out false alerts, are legitimate. But he also pointed out that there's a lot of work being done to prevent those kinds of occurences. Also, in terms of the public sending in false alerts or information, because Twitter is so heavily used, the information is pretty much self-correcting, as folks join in to say what really is being observed.

Because social-networking technology is still relatively new, there’s no way of knowing yet just what it can and can’t do. Furthermore, while Twitter may have more than 4 million registered users, that’s worldwide, and as a portion of the overall U.S. population, that isn’t a lot. But use is growing, and online social networking does provide an inexpensive way to communicate not only within an agency, but with the public at large. Who knows what's next?