Lessons Learned from the Use of Social Media in Combating a Crisis: a Case Study of 2011 Thailand Flooding Disaster

Social media have played integral roles in many crises around the world. Thailand faced severe floods between July 2011 and January 2012, when more than 13.6 million people were affected. This 7-month disaster provides a great opportunity to understand the use of social media for managing a crisis project before, during, and after its occurrence. However, current literature lacks a theoretical framework on investigating the relationship between social media and crisis management from the project management perspective. The paper adopts a social media-based crisis management framework and the structuration theory in investigating and analyzing social media. The results suggest that social media should be utilized to meet different information needs in order to achieve the success of managing a future crisis project.