Social media in disaster response : Queensland Police Service - public engagement during the 2011 floods

Social Media, particularly Microblogging services, are now being adopted as an additional tool for emergency service agencies to be able to interact with the community at all stages of a disaster. Unfortunately, no standard framework for Social Media adoption for disaster management exists and emergency service agencies are adopting Social Media in an ad-hoc fashion. This paper seeks to provide a general understanding of how Social Media is being used by emergency service agencies during disasters, to better understand how we might develop a standardised framework of adoption. In this study of the 2010/11 Queensland Flood event, Facebook broadcast messages from the Queensland Police Service to the general public, were analysed by genre. Findings show that these Microblogging activities were mostly about information distribution and warning broadcasts and that the strength of Social Media for two-way communication and collaboration with the general public, was under-utilised during this event.<br /

The Impact of Disaster Typology on Social Media Use by Emergency Services Agencies: The Case of the Boston Marathon Bombing

In disaster management, emergency services agencies such as police forces, are growingly using social media microblogging services as an additional channel to distribute information to the general public. How these emergency services agencies are using these social media channels is still insufficiently understood. This paper introduces Actor-Network-Theory as a means to understand the emergency services agency social media utilisation. Using the case of the Boston Marathon 2013 Bombing, we apply genre analysis in interpreting the Boston Police Department’s social media communication to understand whether the disaster typology or the used social media channel have an influence on the microblogging utilisation of the emergency services agency. The findings imply that both the used social media channel and the specific characteristics of a disaster have an influence on how a social media channel is used

Towards a Digital Platform to Support/Enhance Community-based Tourism in Developing Countries - Findings from Nepal

Real social impact is not possible without the engagement of the local communities. The paper describes the first phase of an engaged research project in which we develop a digital platform which is able to support and enhance Community-Based Tourism in Developing Countries. With the help of a local community in Nepal, we co-develop and understand the requirements which need to be included in a digital platform to support Community-Based Tourism in Developing Countries. The data is collected through three focus groups which explore “Categories of Local Tourism products/services”, “Education, Training, and Awareness Raising”, and “Design structures of a Digital Platform”. The participants of the focus groups were community leaders, local business owners, entrepreneurs, and tourism association representatives. The findings contribute to our understanding of supporting local entrepreneurism through digital platforms and help to make the world a better place with Information Systems

Sense-Giving Strategies of Media Organisations in Social Media Disaster Communication: Findings from Hurricane Harvey

Media organisations are essential communication stakeholders in social media disaster communication during extreme events. They perform gatekeeper and amplification roles which are crucial for collective sense-making processes. In that capacity, media organisations distribute information through social media, use it as a source of information, and share such information across different channels. Yet, little is known about the role of media organisations on social media as supposed sense-givers to effectively support the creation of mutual sense. This study investigates the communication strategies of media organisations in extreme events. To that matter, a Twitter dataset consisting of 9,414,463 postings was collected during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. We employed social network analysis and content analysis methods to identify media communication approaches. Three different sense-giving strategies were identified: retweeting local in-house outlets; bound amplification of messages of individual associated journalists; and open message amplification

Leveraging Online Social Capital: How the German Red Cross Uses Social Networking Sites

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that focus on humanitarianism, such as the Red Cross, provide services that make the world a better place. To do so, they are highly dependent on a network that generates goodwill, volunteers, and donations. Social Networking Sites (SNS) are a vital channel for NGOs to pursue their organisational objectives. However, how NGOs utilise SNS to tap into resources for social action is insufficiently understood. In this paper, we investigate how the German Red Cross builds and fosters online social capital via SNS. We conducted semi-structured interviews with five SNS experts from regional units of the German Red Cross and analysed their corresponding Twitter and Facebook profiles. Our findings help identify crucial areas of social capital management via SNS for practitioners in the non-profit sector. Moreover, our research contributes to the conceptualisation of organisational online social capital by classifying SNS constituents with respect to structural, relational, and cognitive dimension

Design principles for conversational agents to support Emergency Management Agencies

Widespread mis- and disinformation during the COVID-19 social media “infodemic” challenge the effective response of Emergency Management Agencies (EMAs). Conversational Agents (CAs) have the potential to amplify and distribute trustworthy information from EMAs to the general public in times of uncertainty. However, the structure and responsibilities of such EMAs are different in comparison to traditional commercial organizations. Consequently, Information Systems (IS) design approaches for CAs are not directly transferable to this different type of organization. Based on semi-structured interviews with practitioners from EMAs in Germany and Australia, twelve meta-requirements and five design principles for CAs for EMAs were developed. In contrast to the traditional view of CA design, social cues should be minimized. The study provides a basis to design robust CAs for EMAs

Social Media within Emergency Management Organisations - A case study exploring Social Media utilisation for Emergency and Disaster Management

Over the last decade, we have seen that social media services have been widely adopted to communicate with friends or family members, and to generate and consume information. It is not a surprise, therefore, that social media services are also used as powerful communication platforms during disasters and other emergency extreme events. This thesis explores the utilisation and integration of social media services into emergency management organisations (EMOs) for the purpose of day-to-day as well as emergency and disaster management operational modes. EMOs such as fire services, use social media to provide information to, and engage with, the general public and as a source of relevant information to support their situational awareness during an extreme event. Social media services have been adopted by EMOs as an important additional communication channel during times of emergency and disaster management, where EMOs are central and trusted participants within emerging and dynamic social communication networks. Still, for EMOs, social media is a newly adopted technology which is not yet fully understood for this purpose. While some research has analysed social media data to learn how EMOs are communicating with the general public and non-government institutions through their social media channels, little is known as to how EMOs embed social media services into their organisational structures and processes. This research contributes to closing this research gap through an explorative and interpretive case study which highlights how EMOs utilise and integrate social media services into their day-to-day operations, processes and structures as well as into their operational mode during emergencies and disasters. This study analyses five different EMOs, in two different jurisdictions that have adopted and utilise social media services. This research focusses on the integration of social media services within these EMOs and how these EMOs use social media depending on their mode of operation, i.e. day-to-day or emergency management, for: 1) internal EMO communication; 2) interaction with other EMOs; and 3) communication with the general public and media organisations. The analysis of these cases is used to develop a framework of social media utilisation in emergency management organisations for emergency and disaster management. It also contributes to our existing body of knowledge about social media utilisation in emergency and disaster management scenarios. The results of this research project further provide EMOs with a basis to improve their existing approaches to social media utilisation

Sydney siege, December 2014: A visualisation of a semantic social media sentiment analysis

Sentiment Analyses are widely used approaches to understand and identify emotions, feelings, and opinion on social media platforms. Most sentiment analysis systems measure the presumed emotional polarity of texts. While this is sufficient for some applications, these approaches are very limiting when it comes to understanding how social media users actually use language resources to make sense of extreme events. In this paper, the authors apply a Sentiment Analysis based on the Appraisal System from the theory of communication called Systemic Functional Linguistics to understand the sentiment of event-driven social media communication. A prototype was developed to code and visualise geotagged Twitter data using the Appraisal System. This prototype was applied to tweets collected during and after the Sydney Siege, a hostage situation in a busy café in Sydney\u27s inner city at the 15th of December 2014. Because the Appraisal System is a theorised functional communication method, the results of this analysis are more nuanced than is possible with traditional polarity based sentiment analysis

Communication Roles in Public Events

Part 5: Social MediaInternational audienceWhilst many studies have looked at the characteristics of effective communications via social media platforms, their use during public events for people to communicate and organize is still relatively uncharted. We have even less understanding of the roles that public event participants play in their use of social media, and this study seeks to address this gap in our knowledge. We analyse the Twitter data related to the 1st May 2014 event (Labour Day) in Germany to identify participant roles in this event, and the impact their tweets had on other participants. From this analysis we draw some tentative conclusions about participant roles in public events and their impact and highlight areas for further investigation