User roles for emergency management in social media: Understanding actors' behavior during the 2018 Majorca Island flash floods

Abstract

Social media assemble multiple users' interactions across singular events. Authorities need to navigate this diversity to effectively communicate and promote collaborative strategies. During emergency situations, discerning “who is there” is even more important for authorities, as this tracing process can save lives reaching the appropriate targets. This article contributes to this problem during emergency situations by proposing a user role taxonomy. We argue that focusing on functional behaviors could bypass the complexity of defining audiences during critical events. We test our framework using data from the 2018 flash floods in Sant Llorenç, Majorca island (Spain). Results show a diverse set of audience roles that emerge during crisis and post-crisis stages. We also identify the inclination of actors to represent certain roles and not others. Our findings contribute to understand crisis development models, and also crisis coordination configurations, such as the four-channel model or the network coordination perspective. Practical implications for public managers vary from improving coordination to influence audience's behavior during crises.

Effects of local government social media use on citizen compliance during a crisis: Evidence from the COVID‐19 crisis in China

“…Social media platforms provide government agencies with a channel to reach citizens immediately, inform citizens of the crisis conditions, contain the spread of false information, respond to stakeholder requests, monitor the situation, and help victims. Previous studies have reported many cases of government use of social media in different kinds of crises such as earthquakes (Zhang et al, 2020 ), floods (Villodre & Criado, 2020 ), nuclear disasters (Utz et al, 2013 ), water pollution (Yuan & Gascó, 2018 ), smog (Lin et al, 2016 ), and riots (Panagiotopoulos et al, 2014 ). These studies mainly focused on the timeliness (Spence et al, 2015 ; Wukich, 2016 ; Yuan & Gascó, 2018 ), the content (Chen et al, 2020 ; Wang et al, 2021 ), and the dissemination features (Kim & Hastak, 2018 ; Wukich et al, 2019 ) of government social media use during crises.…”

Toward an Integrated Disaster Management Approach: How Artificial Intelligence Can Boost Disaster Management

“…Usage of social networking sites and digital technologies provides the general population with appropriate and effective means of disseminating and consuming information [30]. Throughout natural or man-made disasters, millions of people are rapidly turning to social media to disclose information [31,32].…”

Redes sociales (en las administraciones públicas)

“…En general, la investigación sobre redes sociales en las administraciones deberá enfrentarse a ciertos desafíos para reducir algunas de sus lagunas. En primer lugar, los académicos deben comenzar a prestar más atención al estudio de los actores que se relacionan con las administraciones (Villodre y Criado, 2020b;Panagiotopoulos et al, 2017). Sin mejorar la comprensión sobre quiénes son esos actores podemos tener dificultades para comprender cómo deben dirigirse los mensajes, y, en definitiva, para entender y mejorar la conformación de la identidad digital de cada administración.…”

“…Sin mejorar la comprensión sobre quiénes son esos actores podemos tener dificultades para comprender cómo deben dirigirse los mensajes, y, en definitiva, para entender y mejorar la conformación de la identidad digital de cada administración. En ese sentido, analizar el comportamiento de esos actores puede ayudar a académicos y administraciones públicas a comprender mejor sus comunidades y cómo actúan ante ciertos eventos (Villodre y Criado, 2020b;Shwartz-Asher et al, 2017). En segundo lugar, el gran interés que han suscitado los estudios centrados en la dimensión externa de las redes sociales ha eclipsado el desarrollo del conocimiento sobre el uso que hacen los empleados públicos de estas tecnologías para relacionarse profesionalmente (Criado et al, 2019;Demircioglu y Chen, 2019;.…”