Software Innovations to Support the Use of Social Media by Emergency Managers

ABSTRACT

Although social media (SM) can be very useful for emergency managers (EMs), especially for providing situational awareness in the early stages of a disaster, many do not use it. This study is based on 477 responses to an online survey of U.S. county-level EMs. The two most important barriers to the use of SM for collecting information are lack of staff and fears of information overload. A number of potential software enhancements that could help overcome the limitations of SM for EMs were all rated as highly useful. Factor analyses were successfully performed on the sets of questions about barriers and about software enhancements. The barrier of trustworthiness of SM data was a significant predictor of usefulness of some of the enhancement factors. Differences related to characteristics of the respondents and their agencies are explored, and open-ended comments that help to explain the findings are summarized.

Acknowledgements

Portions of this article were adapted from several prior conference papers, including Runqing Rao, Linda Plotnick, and S. Roxanne Hiltz “Supporting the Use of Social Media by EMs: Software tools to Overcome Information Overload”, Proceedings of HICSS 2017, paper 36, pages 304–312. We are grateful to the many colleagues and Ph.D. students who have worked with us on this project over the years, particularly Dr. Jane Kushma. We especially thank the EM professionals who took time from their very busy schedules to complete our survey.

Notes

¹ In this article, we will refer somewhat interchangeably to major emergencies, disasters, catastrophes, and crises; the distinction is the scale of the disruption, but social media can be used for events and incidents that range from the local to the multi-national. We mean to encompass all events that are too large or serious to be handled by just the local first responders.

² http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4127.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Linda Plotnick

Linda Plotnick is a visiting Assistant Professor at Lafayette College, PA in the Computer Science department. Her research focuses on social informatics with emphasis on use of Social Media in crisis. She has also studied partially distributed teams and is currently looking at “fake news”.

Starr Roxanne Hiltz

Starr Roxanne Hiltz is Distinguished Professor Emerita, College of Computing Sciences, NJIT. Since “retiring” she has had many visiting research and/or teaching appointments. Research interests currently include virtual teams and online communities, online learning, Emergency Response Information Systems, and social computing.