Listening to Your Community Georgia Emergency Management Agency Georgia Department of Public Health

Hurricane Twitter Chat with GEMA Director Charley English  Inaugural chat  Objective: To give Georgians the opportunity to ask Director English questions about what GEMA is doing to prepare for hurricane season and how households can get ready  Used #AskGEMA  Promoted via traditional press release, “The Hurricane Watch” e-newsletter, notices sent to local, state and federal partners, and social media.  Started following influencers and sent direct messages #TeamGASocial

It Takes a Village!  Thanks to partners who helped promote the chat.  Local emergency management agencies  Meteorologists  State agencies such as georgia.gov, Georgia Dept. of Public Health, etc.  FEMA  Claire Simms #TeamGASocial

#AskGEMA Monitored Using GEMA’s #TeamGASocial

Results/Best Practices  Received positive feedback from the public  Thank you for the answers! Always gotta think ahead of the game! Have a great day! #AskGEMA  Direct responses from Charley inspired deep faith in our audience and in the reliability of content acquired 104 followers between May 31 and June 4  Average is 150/month  Reach = 292,124 followers, 440,000 timeline deliveries (Hashtracking.com)  Created recap on “Get Ready” blog using Storify.com, a platform were users can aggregate tweets, photos. GPB also posted #TeamGASocial

Lessons Learned  Use a tool such as tweetchat.com to facilitate the chat  Use only one hashtag and reply to questions with the hashtag included – some people just monitor the hashtag, not your feed  The Twitterverse will let you know when mistakes are made  Have a SME to verify or research information needed for responses  Keep a list of handles for partner organizations that can be referenced quickly #TeamGASocial

DPH Emergency Preparedness Twitter Chat  One hour on June 11, 2013; #DPHchat  Featured tweeters from DPH, GEMA, health districts, Emory CEPAR, Home Depot  Purpose: to promote emergency preparedness, educate about the roles of government agencies and individual citizens before/during/after disasters  Format: panel discussion, including questions #TeamGASocial

Putting It All Together  Coordinated two weeks in advance with organizations/individuals planning to join  Promotion: DPH social media, partner organizations’ social media, news release, news stories  During the chat: used Tweetchat to keep track of the hashtag; fielded questions from people experiencing technical difficulties  After the chat: Storify, promotion via news stories and our #TeamGASocial

DPH Preparedness Twitter Chat: Results  Reach = 177,122 followers, 1.26 million timeline deliveries (Hashtracking.com)  Tweets, Facebook posts about the chat (before and after) were some of most popular/shared in the past 6 months  Positive response #TeamGASocial

What helped? What hurt?  Hooray!  Collaboration with partner agencies (thanks GEMA, georgia.gov!)  Invitation to a national partner with a large Twitter following (Home Depot)  Wealth of SMEs, both at state and local levels  Twitter chat preparedness!  Stumbling block:  Tweets #TeamGASocial

Thank you!  Questions? Comments?  Feel free to get in touch!  Lisa Janak Newman, GEMA  Carrie Gann, DPH Communications, #TeamGASocial