Final Grant Report to Vt Ccsr Social Media for Cities, Counties and Communities

1 Overview Social media (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube) and other tools and services with usergenerated content have made a staggering amount of information (and misinformation) available. Some government officials seek to leverage these resources to improve services and communication with citizens, especially during crises and emergencies. Yet, the sheer volume of social data streams generates substantial noise that must be filtered. Potential exists to rapidly identify issues of concern for emergency management by detecting meaningful patterns or trends in the stream of messages and information flow. Similarly, monitoring these patterns and themes over time could provide officials with insights into the perceptions and mood of the community that cannot be collected through traditional methods (e.g., phone or mail surveys) due to their substantive costs, especially in light of reduced and shrinking budgets of governments at all levels. We conducted a pilot study in 2010 with government officials in Arlington, Virginia (and to a lesser extent representatives of groups from Alexandria and Fairfax, Virginia) with a view to contributing to a general understanding of the use of social media by government officials as well as community organizations, businesses and the public. We were especially interested in gaining greater insight into social media use in crisis situations (whether severe or fairly routine crises, such as traffic or weather disruptions). Our findings from the pilot study fall into three main areas: 1) local government agencies use social media without knowing its costs and benefits, or who their actual audience is, who in their organization should monitor communications, how and when they should be responding, and what effect their social media communications have on the public; 2) new tools are needed to help government and citizens make sense of the overwhelming amount of data that is being generated, to model the flow of information, and to identify patterns over time; and 3) digital libraries are needed to archive and curate generated content, especially for crisis and social convergence situations, but also for analyses that cover longer time frames. Our work also builds on a larger set of studies carried out by a Virginia Tech team funded by NSF (IIS-0916733) with the overarching goal of building a Crisis, Tragedy and Recovery Network (CTRnet) (http://www.ctrnet.net).