Dialogical Emergency Management and Strategic Awareness in Emergency Communication

This paper introduces two concepts—dialogical emergency management and strategic awareness—as means to use and understand the content of social media for the purpose of emergency communication. Dialogical emergency management denotes that the emergency management organizations follow what people publish in various social media on emergencies and ongoing emergency response, and then adjust their information strategies in a way that matches the expectations and needs for emergency information of the public. The concept of strategic awareness suggests that it is essential to have an understanding of the receiver (public) of emergency information but also to have an understanding of the receivers’ idea about the emergency and emergency response. Hence, the notion of strategic awareness incorporates structured awareness of how people interpret, value, and reacts on communication based on what they think about the sender’s (emergency management organization’s) actual intentions and motives.