Beware the “ReTwecho”

I participated in several discussions this week related to emergency management/crisis response and SM.  Lots of good ideas about ways to educate the emergency community about best practices integrating  SM into response, and experience using SM in real life.  Mostly I just listened to the experts.  Fascinating and educational. I continue to be humbled by their experience and professionalism. Out of these conversations, I mined these nuggets.

• What we consider to be a “routine” incident  may be anything but by the “looklyloos”.  We need to be constantly monitoring their view of reality, checking it against ours and adjust messaging as appropriate.
• Highly visible and threatening incidents  result in a long and loud “ReTwecho”.  Folks retweet hours old information, perpetuating noise that must be filtered to maintain situational awareness.  However,  this may be more of a problem for those on the outside of the response who do not have access to inside information/situation unit data.  The ease of the RT is both a blessing and a curse. On the high profile incidents I monitored recently I tended to ignore verbatim RT’s, and gave only slight notice to RT’s with additional comment.  Instead I focused on original tweets, looking for new information. 
• RT’s help quantify public perception of common concerns and interests, which may help with creating effective global messaging.  But, RT’s may not provide any valuable insight about what is really important to those directly involved or impacted.
• On the fly hashtag creation is a hot topic.  What is the best way to create a meaningful hashtag during a crisis event?  What about creating an “ubertag”? (I had to look up the word uber….) Dunno…. But, from the cheapseats it seems to be mostly an organic process that can be influenced by early and aggressive messaging by response agencies using a hashtag that contains two unique identifiers- Location and  Mechanism/event   (#Tucsonshooting, #Sanbrunofire, #wifeshomecooking, etc…)
• Even if your agency doesn’t have a SM presence that can be exploited during crisis, at the very least someone  needs to monitor SM to help gain and maintain situational awareness.
• How the heck do we simulate SM use during emergency exercises?  How do we attract the public to engage SM systems to communicate during drills?  I may be naïve, but if we establish a SM presence ahead of time (as we all advocate) we have a base group to work with.   Send out messages about the simulated event(s), ask specific questions about emergency preparedness, ask what info they would want at any given time, provide info about current status of exercise operations.  The weekly Twitter #SMEMchat  is an excellent engagement exercise that  forces me to quickly assimilate what can be several parallel and/or intertwined conversations.  It is a unique form of engagement that takes some getting used to.  Effective planning and simple engagement via various SM tools is really the most valuable part of a SM exercise.