Spotting the Trends in Disaster Tweets

There are patterns in how disasters unfold that emergency managers monitoring social media can use to make smart decisions about what’s real and what doesn’t add up, according to a Federal Emergency Management Agency official.

• Phase one of using social media to aid emergency management is about gathering situational awareness from tweets and Facebook posts, broadcasting important safety information to people in the disaster area and correcting misinformation, said Carter Hewgley, director of FEMAStat, a program evaluation arm of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
• The second phase, Hewgley said, is about learning from patterns in how the public uses social media in disasters so you can respond in a smarter way the next time.

(Nov 21)