Informing crisis alerts using social media: Best practices and proof of concept

Abstract

Social media has become an integrated part of human communication, both as a means to establish and maintain social relationships, and as a means of sharing and co-creating information. Social media comes with an array of possibilities for individuals as well as organizations, corporations, and authorities. Within the field of crisis communication, social media possibilities such as online sharing and social networking have had an impact on the way crisis information is disseminated and updated. This paper addresses the issues related to using social media for communicating crisis information and broadcasting alert messages to the general population, discusses the role of social media in future pan-European crisis alerting, and presents a prototype system demonstrating the possibilities. An extensive systematic literature review was carried out to identify factors that affect the use of social media for alerting and warning. These factors were mirrored in experiences, collected through interviews, obtained by emergency management organizations in three European countries (Sweden, Czech Republic, and Spain). The factors finally form the basis for suggestions and recommendations regarding the design of technological tools for both communication and information collection to serve as an integral part of a future pan-European crisis alerting system.

Wireless Emergency Alert messages: Influences on protective action behaviour

“…To date, research on terse messaging in risk communication has focused largely on best practices for social media platforms, such as Twitter (Bean et al, ; Brynielsson et al, ), but scholarship evaluating WEA messages, or text messages more generally, is increasing. Wireless Emergency Alert research has investigated geotargeting delivery mechanisms (Gunduzhan, Doshi, & Benmohamed, ) and how message style and content, including the use of visuals, influence message processing.…”

The interplay between governmental communications and fellow citizens’ reactions via twitter: Experimental results of a theoretical crisis in the Netherlands

“…However, research of Brynielsson et al. () showed that local and regional authorities also can be seen as more trustworthy due to their contextual awareness.…”

Caregivers' Perception of the Caring challenges in Coronavirus (COVID-19) Crisis: A Qualitative Study

“…The participants declared that they had not been provided with any education or preset action plans for handling the coronavirus and that all the planning and decision-making began when the infection had already started to become widespread. As mentioned in many studies, timely and proper provision of information is a key factor in controlling critical conditions and minimizing causalities and nancial costs [25].…”