ONE of the many fascinating topics discussed in my recent workshops with Melcrum was around crisis comms: if you would and if so how you might use Social Media in a crisis.
Dave Fleet comes up with a very timely post on the whole crisis comms/social media issue.
“Immediacy is one of the great things about new media/web 2.0.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the coverage of the devastating wildfires down in California recently.”
Some of the many key points:
- Newsrooms have limited staff. The government, however, has far more extensive resources. Add in the potential for citizen contributions and you have a powerful tool for emergency information.
- Google “California Wildfires.” Two of the top five links are government websites. Heck, we don’t even need to wonder if people are going to the government’s website – their CAL FIRE Incident website crashed under the increased traffic. The LA Times twitter feed, at time of writing, has 96 followers. With the traffic going to government sites, they could push information out much more effectively to many times more people.
- To my surprise, the state of California has a very useful resource at www.calfires.com (although it seems to be up one second, down the next due to high traffic). However, while the resources are useful, I’m surprised at their lack of uptake of new technologies on the website.
The site does have an interactive map. However, on close inspection it turns out that the map is actually from the KPBS News site mentioned above.
Why didn’t California take the bull by the horns and turn its own site into a communications hub during the crisis? Why not do what the news outlets did and use this technology to provide up-to-the-minute updates?
Great reading and good thought provocation, Dave.
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