1. Social Organization Framework for Emergency Planning: Community Training in Disability Issues Train-the-Trainer Manual Virtual Networks - Twitter Last updated: January 15, 2011

2. "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. -

3. Twitter - Overview  Service launched in 2006  Accessed at www.twitter.comwww.twitter.com  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

4. 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

5. 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.

6. Twitter – Hashtags

7. Twitter – Hashtags: Examples  The first use of a hashtag to help coordinate a response to a natural disaster was in 2007. Nate Ritter used #sandiegofire when he was tweeting about forest fires in San Diego, CA. Source: SanDiegoNews.com

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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.