Social Media Usage

I picked up the following from an email from Cheryl Bledsoe who is a social media maven who moved from an emergency management position in Clark County, Wash., to a 911 position in Oregon. I encourage you to take the survey to add to the database of responses. I took the survey myself and it is pretty simple to do, won't take much of your time. Even if you are not using social media — do the survey so the database is more accurate and reflective of the actual use of social media.

My guess is the following for emergency managers (prove me wrong — please!)

• Pretty much every program office has a Facebook page and maybe a Twitter account
• No dedicated people to monitor (and, they are not needed either!) There are tools that can be used.
• 75 percent of the programs use Facebook on an occasional basis to push information out. Higher if they do have a "believer" on staff
• The other social media tools are used infrequently unless, again, there is someone on staff pushing the usage or using a tool like YouTube
• Highly unlikely that program offices are monitoring social media during events to get situational awareness or for rumor control
• Change is coming, but slowly ...

"When I was recently back at the International CAD Consortium, our attendees were surveyed for use of social media within a 911 center environment by DataTech 911 who is gathering information on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security’s Science & Technology Directorate (same arm of DHS that houses the Virtual Social Media Working Group). 

DataTech 911 is conducting a social media survey on use by 911, first responders and emergency management They are asking that the [linked] survey be shared as widely as possible among emergency management and first responder groups."

From DataTech

“When Meaningful Events are identified, data gathered from social media and 911 CAD incidents trigger correlation analytics which will inform Incident Command and improve responder readiness, situational awareness, decision making, and overall scene safety.”

One of the key steps in this research is to gather input from industry leaders like yourself on the use of social media in your organization.