It was the first time the department put social media data into an official situation report that is looked at by all the incident command system leadership, said Hadi. “If emergency management and public health, in particular, are not using social media they should consider it because it gives you situational awareness and puts out official information. It allows you to monitor your reputation.”
(Full disclosure: Bill Boyd, Patrice Cloutier and I were involved in helping plan this department's social media monitoring operation.) It's one thing to plan, it's quite another to operationalize and we congratulate NYCDOHMH on setting up and making this social media monitoring operation work in this challenging situation.
The question coming out of this for you is: Has your organization set up a scalable social media monitoring operation, and is it tightly integrated with Incident Command leadership? More, can it filter social noise into actionable intelligence in succinct reports? You have in front of you an example of how this is done and how important it can be. In a public health outbreak and scare (this was both) social media can help quickly identify where there are actual or feared outbreaks and identify rumors and false information. Both are critically important when dealing with controlling the spread of infectious disease while keeping the public from going insane.
Operationalizing social media monitoring results is not an easy task. It faces tremendous hurdles. I'm working currently with a client with about 9,000 employees and a whole range of crises and emergencies arising from a very diverse and siloed organization. But senior management understands the importance of getting access to good information early to make effective response decisions. In some, but not all, events, the best information comes first through social media. So in setting up an information gathering and reporting system, it is essential to incorporate 24/7 social media monitoring into the process.
I'm interested in hearing how your organization is dealing with this issue. It's my guess that probably fewer than 25 percent of organizations with emergency management requirements have a social media monitoring team, plan and process in place. But that's just a guess. If anyone has information on where we stand with that I'd love to hear from you. And will be happy to use this blog to share best practices and lessons learned. Contact me at gbaron@crisiscommtraining.com.
