Emergency Notification and Crisis Management Service

Company F-24 UK Ltd
Date 18.09.2013

Love it, or loathe it, social media is playing an increasingly important role in how each of us live our daily lives. From keeping in touch with friends and work connections, sharing photos and following our favourite sports teams, the average individual is now estimated to spend around 6.7 hours per month surfing their favourite social media sites.

This figure has more than doubled since 2006, as smartphones allow us to keep in touch on the bus, train or (as I witnessed recently) on the treadmill at the gym. The benefits of social media are varied. The information that each of us volunteer to sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook can allow advertisers to target their message effectively to those with a relevant profile. Additionally, Twitter can allow each of us to interact directly with our favourite celebrities while also providing the ability to post instant feedback to the companies that we deal with. And it is the “instant” nature of Twitter that can be invaluable to those managing an incident or disaster scenario. A quick look at some of the “old world” television media organisations during an unfolding situation would suggest that the correspondent on the ground is increasingly being usurped by teams of social media analysts. Such analysts review photos, videos and text from social media sources to provide their viewers with an informed overview of the situation.

The recent Asiana Airlines plane crash at San Francisco International Airport provides an excellent example of how quickly information and photos can be uploaded into the social media environment.  It was estimated that the first photos of the event were posted to twitter by passengers within two minutes of their evacuation from the aircraft and onto the tarmac. David Eun was a passenger on board the flight and provided one of first tweets from the scene of the incident: “I just crash landed at SFO. Tail ripped off. Most everyone seems fine,” he wrote at 12:13 p.m. “I’m OK.” This message was subsequently re-tweeted 32,000 times as the post spread rapidly across cyberspace. He then followed up the initial tweet with a photo of the stricken aircraft on the runway:

Given the “instant” nature of social media, the Asiana Airlines incident provides one of many examples where the flow information from the scene is both quick and accurate. Such information can then be utilised by crisis management teams to make informed decisions as to the scale and scope of the incident in relative real time, and assist with what resources need to be deployed. As such, business continuity and crisis management teams need to ensure that their plans are flexible enough to incorporate and react to information from social media.

Contact

F-24 UK Ltd
Cardinal Point
Park Road
Rickmansworth
Hertfordshire
United Kingdom
WD3 1RE
  • +44 (0) 1923 432 715