Social Organization Framework for Emergency Planning: Community Training in Disability Issues Train-the-Trainer Manual Virtual Networks - Twitter Last updated: January 15, 2011
"Thanks to the Internet and social media applications, such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter, the public is able to seek and share information quickly during a health or safety crisis." Keri Stephens, assistant professor of communication studies at The University of Texas at Austin. -
Twitter - Overview Service launched in 2006 Accessed at A social networking and micro-blogging service, enabling users to send and read messages called tweets Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters and are displayed on a user’s profile page Users may subscribe to other users’ tweets – this is known as following. Subscribers are known as followers Anyone can signup to use the service for free Sources: Twitter.com, Wikipedia
Twitter - Statistics Has over 190 million active users world-wide (July 2010) 65 million tweets are sent each day Twitter usage spikes during prominent world-wide events Sources: Wikipedia, TechCrunch
Twitter – Hashtags Twitter users can group posts together by topic or type by use of hashtags – words or phrases prefixed with a # Source: Twitter.com Clicking on a hashtagged word in any message shows you all other tweets in that category.
Twitter – Hashtags
Twitter – Hashtags: Examples The first use of a hashtag to help coordinate a response to a natural disaster was in Nate Ritter used #sandiegofire when he was tweeting about forest fires in San Diego, CA. Source: SanDiegoNews.com
Twitter – Hashtags: Examples Since then, Twitter hashtags have been routinely used as a form of crisis communication during a time of disaster The Red Cross posted info about evacuations, shelters and food distribution during Hurricane Ike in 2008 using hashtag #ike The hashtag #chile was used to tweet information about missing people, tsunami alerts and services during the February 2010 earthquake in Chile Source: SanDiegoNews.com
Twitter – Hashtags: Examples Source: Grayson Daughters, WaySouth Media The following video provides an example of how Twitter and hashtags were used for crisis communications when major flooding occurred in Atlanta, GA in 2009
Twitter – Hashtags: Action Plan 1. Establish a common hashtag or set of hashtags for use in your community as part of emergency planning. 2. Promote the use of Twitter and hashtags as a viable, real-time communications tool for organizations and individuals within your community.