Social Media, Crisis Communication, and Emergency Management

Emergency-response organization utilization of social media during a disaster: A case study of the 2013 Seoul floods

“…Particularly, young and college-educated individuals are likely to use social media to seek out disaster-related news (Smith, 2010). With increasing access to social media via smartphones, social media are now especially useful during and after disasters when other communication media are often unavailable (Mäkinen & Kuira, 2008;Silverman, 2010;White, 2011). While many individuals still rely on traditional media to learn about emergency situations, social media have become important supplementary, if not primary, communication channels for others (Sorensen & Sorensen, 2006).…”

“…Recently, there have been several occasions where social media contributed to raising organizational resilience in Seoul (Liu, 2012). In fact, efforts to adopt and incorporate social media into the field of emergency management have rapidly increased during the last few years (Harman, 2011;Liu, 2012;White, 2011;Yates & Paquette, 2011).…”

“…These difficulties often derived from the high cost of communication, relatively slow speed of information dissemination, and even misinformation and/or disinformation (e.g., propaganda) in mass media (Park, Choi, & Park, 2011;White, 2011). Therefore, organizations have continuously searched for more efficient communication technologies to disseminate information, better coordinate recovery activities, and support the public (White, 2011). In order to overcome the shortcomings of mass media communication, organizations have adopted the Internet as a supplementary, rather than alternative, communication channel.…”

“…In order to overcome the shortcomings of mass media communication, organizations have adopted the Internet as a supplementary, rather than alternative, communication channel. Specifically, emergency management scholars argue that social networking services (SNS), also referred to as social media, have become key technologies in times of crises (White, 2011;Yates & Paquette, 2011).…”

“…In recent years, disaster response organizations have determined how to successfully use SNSs in dealing with disasters and crisis situations (Liu, Iacucci, & Meier, 2010;Palen, Vieweg, Liu, & Hughes, 2009;White, 2011). Consequently, researchers have begun to empirically examine the relevance and role of social media uses in the process of building organizational resilience, which is defined as the ability of organizations to recover from setbacks encountered in dealing with crises such as natural disasters..…”