Social media can be a powerful tool for disseminating information, a veritable godsend for authorities to contact people… assuming people know the information is there. Let’s review a brief and abridged history;
2005: Hurricane Katrina, NOLA.com (website of the Times-Picayune newspaper, serving New Orleans) and the Biloxi-based Sun Herald legitimised online journalism by receiving the first Pulitzer Prizes awarded to websites for ‘providing a lifeline for devastated readers, in print and online, during their time of greatest need.’ Blogs somehow updated from within New Orleans kept the mainstream media honest. This legitimised the internet as an emergency management tool.
2007: Wildfires in San Diego County, California are tracked by journalists for KPBS San Diego, who were applauded for their efforts to keep residents informed. The Google map that provided a visual guide to the fires is still online.
2010: Twitter proved itself as an Emergency Management tool following the Haitian earthquake, local personalities such as radio and television host Carel Pedre were twittering away, sending short bursts of important information out both to the wider world and the locals who needed it most. Most importantly to this article, it shows the value of mobile internet.
So, social media works in emergencies – the newspaper websites and blogs of Katrina have moved over to include the more immediate Twitter, broadcasting breaking news across the world in real-time. The problem with using Twitter to keep affected people informed is that if they don’t know you’re doing it they may not get the message; the golden rule of social media is visibility.
Visibility: You're welcome, Orlando
This is the situation that the city of Orlando, Florida, is facing as the 2010 Atlantic Hurricane Season begins. Rolling out just twelve days earlier, the City of Orlando Fire Department Office of Emergency Management’s (OEM) Twitter (@orlOEM) boasted 26 followers as the season opened on June 1st. One week in, and they’ve increased their stock to 40 followers and a timeline averaging a single tweet a week.
I almost followed it until I realised it’d screw up my numbers.
Only one online source even mentioned the account at launch, the Orlando Sentinal, in an article published the day before the season began. The same publication warns on its homepage that ‘Major hurricanes [are] more likely during busy seasons,’ such as the one forecast for this year. With just a few dozen followers, little fanfare, and a hasty release, anyone might think this was a token effort from a town hall that claims, in their own social media guidelines, to want ‘to maintain a moderated online discussion.’ Yet even with this air of tokenism, the OEM intends to roll out a complementary facebook account.
Compare this to the Louisiana Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (@GOHSEP). The account is currently focused on the Oil Spill (you may have possibly heard about it and can read our view on it here) but is legally bound to answer all questions fielded, providing an interesting and constantly moving timeline full of @ messages and announcements. The office considers their 2,052 followers to be low but, as Jennifer Valentino-DeVries over at the WSJ reports, they’re ‘concentrating on responding to people and getting its message out to others who will retweet it. Often, if someone asks a contentious question via Twitter, the staff will take the conversation to Twitter’s private “direct message” system.’ Christina Stephens (the GOHSEP director of communications) gets Twitter.
Michael McCarthy (the City of Orlando’s creative-services manager and social media editor) doesn’t. It’s bad enough for an Office of Emergency Management in a place that tends to get walloped by hurricanes to only have 40 followers – but its just embarrassing to consider that the New York OEM’s announcement of hurricane season was seen by six times as many people. Keep in mind that hurricanes tend to reach NY as gentle breezes and drizzle.
McCarthy would be wise to look at Louisiana’s social media strategy and ask the neighbours for advice; Walt Disney World’s official Twitter account has accumulated over 62,000 followers – that could be one hell of a retweet. Why not simply ask for one? Unless of course there’s been some sort of falling out between the area and the company responsible for driving most of the region’s tourism, which seems unlikely.
These followers are undoubtedly not all locals, but Disney is a remarkably strong presence in the area’s employment and a strong local brand. The local NBA team, and only major professional sports team in the city, the Orlando Magic broadcasts tweets out to over a million followers. McCarthy could use a piece of that action. Once again, these followers will be from diverse areas – but all will have some connection with Orlando (even if it is just liking their jersey colours – which is understandable) and can potentially use this connection to spread the message out even further. It’s often said that important or interesting information will get retweeted, but if you’re the government who helped to fund a stadium, and would be tasked with cleaning up its debris after a hurricane, I’m pretty sure etiquette dictates you can just go ahead and ask for one.
Think of it like a Twitter-based protection racket. Also, nice colours!
This is one of the basic fundamentals of Twitter – get retweeted, get exposure, get followers. A single re-tweet from the official Disney or Magic accounts would undoubtedly increase followers substantially, increasing the effectiveness of the OEM account. After all, what’s the point of a governmental social media campaign if you’re not going to do it properly?
It’s still early days for the OEM social media campaign – most weather based information services don’t rapidly increase in popularity until the weather is rapidly increasing in proximity, and the more traditional emergency warning system already in place works terrifyingly well (weathermen there can tell you the exact time a tropical storm will end while its hitting you; weathermen here barely seem to know what day it is). Equally, hurricanes don’t exactly lend themselves well to sneak attacks – you’re going to know one way or another if one’s on the way. So, maybe I’m overestimating the impact of social media. Maybe social media just isn’t the priority for the Orlando OEM… or maybe they just straight up don’t get Twitter, which is a shame considering these words from Christina Stephens:
“During an evacuation, people don’t have access to computers, but they can get Facebook on their mobile phone. They’re going to use that interface to get information.”
Twitter is more phone-friendly than Facebook, more easily navigated and accessible. By neglecting to properly publicise their account the Orlando OEM is failing in its own commitment to ‘prepar[e] and [inform] all city residents and businesses,’ and hurting its own effectiveness in the event of a devastating landfall. Time will tell.
About The Author
David Shawcross is an Intern for Social Media Library. He has a Degree in History and Politics from the University of Reading.
Weak Ties and Social Media: Malcolm Gladwell Is Partly Right
Philosophical discussions surrounding the reach and power of social media are all too often tedious and predictable, but the news that Malcolm Gladwell has written a piece in the New York Times which fiercely doubts the extent to which social media can effect large-scale social change, got me interested.
Malcolm Gladwell
Basically Gladwell’s point is that mass behaviour, such as the civil rights movements in the 1960s, took place perfectly naturally without the need for social media. Furthermore, he points out, social media encourages a culture of “me too” in so far as clicking “Like” or “RT” is concerned, but our activism tends to be confined to words rather than deeds these days. In short, social media encourages lazy activism.
Social media evangelists, some of whom often cite Gladwell as their hero, are up in arms, and apparently feel a bit betrayed. There have been numerous discussions on all sorts of blogs in the last few days since the article as published – including an interesting riposte by Leo Mirani here. Meanwhile Twitter’s Biz Stone has hit back as well. I’m in two minds, but tend to agree broadly with much of what Gladwell says where social change is concerned.
An example is Justgiving. A few years ago, if someone was climbing Kilimanjaro or running the marathon for charity, they’d call up their friends and relatives, go into their local newsagent, do a whip-around at work. These days, it’s merely a quick page on Justgiving and that’s it. Most requests for donations completely pass me by because they’re two-a-penny, impersonal requests; if someone called me up and asked me to sponsor them, I’d do it! Then there are the “awareness” campaigns. While I’d agree with Leo Mirani that awareness campaigns are vitally important in many cases, and that social media has indeed revolutionised the way that causes and issues can explosively reach a mass audience, at the same time there are plenty of examples of limp, “passive activism” through social media.
An example was World Aids Day earlier this year, when any tweet with the hashtag #red changed colour. It took off in a big way – huge numbers used the hashtag. But there was rarely any context; I didn’t actually realise the significance of the hashtag until the day was nearly finished, having seen dozens of tweets referring to it. Having fun with colour-changing tweets is all very well, and I’m sure the HIV-positive millions in south Africa would be touched, but commitment levels were clearly minimal.
Another social media example, this time on Facebook, was the viral spreading of Facebook status updates by women, who posted a colour (it turned out to be their bra colour) – apparently men weren’t supposed to know what it meant. To that extent it worked: my at-the-time-all-male office were puzzled for days. (It transpired that it was something to do with breast cancer).
Just last week, a new breast cancer “update your Facebook status” campaign has appeared. If any of your female friends have posted something saucy (“I like it up on the kitchen table”) recently, that’ll be it…I believe it’s something to do with handbags. I must admit to sniggering when a friend of mine wrote that she “likes it hanging from a lightbulb”! Harmless fun, but what good does it to cancer sufferers? I nearly fell into a fatal trap: I posted a cynical update to my own Facebook status, and was shutting down the machine…when the realisation of my own hypocrisy hit me, and I pulled the finger out to give a tenner to Cancer Research (he said, virtuously)!
The examples posed by Gladwell were concerned with activism, but to what extent does social media, more generally, have the power to change behaviour? Can social media affect our decision making processes, which in turn might affect commercial or other enterprises? The debate, I think, is far more wide-reaching than merely political campaigns. To what extent can the connections people forge via social media channels change their behaviour, compared to connections made by more “traditional” means? What are the political, social and commercial implications?
The crucial sentence in Gladwell’s article simply states that “The platforms of social media are built on weak ties”. Yes – but aren’t those the ties with the most potential? Close family-and-friends bonds are immensely powerful, restrict yourself to your usual social circle and it’s all too easy to find yourself associating with people from similar cultural and economic backgrounds, with similar outlooks on life. By throwing caution to the wind (the relative anonymity of social media can help throw off the shackles – a bit like alcohol for losing inhibitions!) and getting involved with a range of conversations, minds have the potential to be changed. I’ll never have a bad word said against my closest friends, I love them all, mates for life and all the rest of it, but our conversations tend to be limited to rugby, women, poker, alcohol, and how much the rest of them are earning. My loose connections in social media allow me to have active discussions on all kinds of offbeat topics.
The internet has facilitated this since its early days. Whether it’s an interest in obscure music or bizarre sexual practices, the internet has allowed people to come together and spread ideas; the fact that Facebook and Twitter have come along and made the process a bit more personal and one-to-one haven’t “revolutionised” this, rather they are an organic extension of internet culture as it was in the early 2000s. And what of the ultimate in extreme views, the cult? It’s far easier to join a cult now than it was in the 60s, and many people are doing more than just spreading words and ideas, but going ahead with actual deeds.
Just a little aside about weak social bonds. They can be misleading. I was at my ten-year school reunion over the weekend; catching up with people who have little in common except that we spent six years in the same building. The general impression beforehand was that the evening would be a cringeworthy affair where we put on plastic smiles, exchanged the usual pleasantries, tossed up a few memories, and left. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Many of us came away open-mouthed about how much those long-distant memories meant to us all. Old school friends are classic examples of those sorts of casual Facebook relationships – but a reunion demonstrates just how those apparently flaky, throwaway “friendships” can be astonishingly powerful.
One of the great things about social media is that it’s possible to converse on an equal footing with world experts in a particular area. People at the top of their game within a profession or interest area mingle with dabblers on a hashtag or discussion forum. It’s something which Andrew Keen rallies against in his book Cult of the Amateur (I haven’t read it); apparently the thrust of his argument is that there’s an obsession with sharing knowledge, even from people who are clueless, so we see a false sense of gravitas created by an individual based on participation levels, social skills, or other interactive means. This week Andrew Marr launched a tirade against bloggers for similar reasons. It’s true that it’s possible to exude a false sense of gravitas on forums and social networks based on participation levels or social skills. It’s also true that many heads are not always better than one. But at the same time, crowdsourcing and wikis provide collaborative efforts unheard of before. (One of the most interesting articles on Wikipedia is actually about the reliability of Wikipedia). There’s no longer a top-down approach to knowledge – a point also made by Ben Goldacre in his excellent Bad Science. Yet the “top” of “top-down” might not be experts but rather a media, government and commercial elite who form opinions almost by brute force. As Goldacre points out, when the small media elite get things wrong, there can be disastrous consequences, as with the MMR “scandal”.
Andrew Marr
Lively discussions now occur in frameworks as diverse as Amazon reviews, Wikipedia talk pages, and comments sections on mainstream media publisher articles, notable on the Guardian and Daily Mail websites (not to mention Guido Fawkes’s blog comments, although tread there with caution). Of all social media, I find forums the most fascinating. Unlike most social networks, forum users tend not to know each other when they join up initially, but bonds and cliques naturally form over time, while all sorts of interesting social undercurrents start to manifest themselves. Inspired by Tom Ewing’s excellent Confessions of a Moderator, at some point I will write a little piece comparing forum dynamics of the ones I’ve known. For a rainy day, though.
In my own personal experience, social networking has allowed me to participate in discussions (often arguments) with people I’ve never met, sometimes halfway around the world. The flow of inbound information and content is far more varied (and just more abundant); no longer are we restricted to what we read in the Metro in the morning, and watch on the ten o’clock news. With minimal effort we can subject ourselves to some rather extreme views from all sides, evaluate them, spread our own ideas around.
Postscript: the bank called me the following morning, alarmed at an unusual payment on my card the previous night to Cancer Research that “didn’t fit in with my normal spending habits”. That’s me told!
About The Author
Eoghan O'Neill
Eoghan O’Neill is a Social Media Analyst for Social Media Library. Responsible for developing the content within Social Media Library, Eoghan spends his day darting between reading blogs and Twitter posts from around the world, and with his nose deep in spreadsheets! Prior to joining Social Media Library he worked within Arts Marketing for a leading arts trust and is a Physics graduate from Imperial College, London.
Eoghan blogs frequently and is an active user of Twitter too @EoghanLondon.