Social Media In Disaster Management System

Abstract

The growing popularity of mobile computing and social media has created new opportunities to incorporate social media data into disaster response. In crisis situations such as natural disasters and mass emergencies, social media data could become a valuable source of real-time, first- hand information from affected individuals and could be used to help emergency managers and first responders efficiently assess and respond to needs. However, responders and affected people alike are unable to fully leverage this information due in part to the massive volume of noisy data, and the lack of tools and processes to help them filter and analyze these new information streams. This report highlights the changing landscape of risk and disaster communications and in particular how social media can be a beneficial tool, but also create challenges for crisis managers. It explores different practices of risk and crisis communications experts related to the use of social media and proposes a framework for monitoring the development of practices among countries in the use of social media for risk and crisis communications. The three step process spans passive to dynamic use of social media, and provides governments a self-assessment tool to monitor and track progress in the uptake of effective use of social media by emergency services or crisis managers.