Title
#Help. The Reality of Social Media Use in Crisis Response: Lessons from a Realistic Crisis Exercise
Abstract
Social media has become an important factor in crisis response. From an improved situational awareness to facilitating communications, it supports responders in more effective crisis handling. Social media also enables affected communities to express their needs and others to respond directly. At the same time social media also poses challenges for responders, handling communications or data overload. To aid professionals in leveraging the potential and overcome challenges, a better understanding of social media as an integrated part of the response operation is needed. While previous research focused on individual aspects or challenges, such as rumor spreading, we use a more holistic approach. Providing a group of volunteers, representing a broad demographic, with various profiles based on real-life cases and actual behavior to act as 'Twitter-simulants'. With these simulants we added a comprehensive, realistic social media component to an extensive crisis exercise. In this paper we present the outline, its design considerations and the initial results, in particular on the achieved realism and added value for responders.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/HICSS.2016.23
2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Social media,Disaster response,Crisis management,Exercise,Citizen engagement
Information overload,Social media,Situation awareness,Computer science,Public relations,Rumor,Added value,Crisis management,Realism,Crisis response
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1530-1605
0
0.34
References 
Authors
13
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kenny Meesters1155.65
Lars van Beek200.34
Bartel Van de Walle334349.52