Social media together with still growing social media communities has become a powerful and promising solution in crisis and emergency management. Previous crisis events have proved that social media and mobile technologies used by citizens (widely) and public services (to some extent) have contributed to the post-crisis relief efforts. The iSAR+ EU FP7 project aims at providing solutions empow...

A hyperbolic portrayal of Ebola in the US resulted in a crisis of misinformation, when an actual outbreak never occurred. We study how online mass media uses discourse in the constitution of a culture of fear, and how non-expert actors (e.g. media) employ a specific line of discussion to legitimize actions outside of science. Strange nationalism is a fantastical construction of foreign, invasiv...

Social media is being used by individuals during a crisis to alert rescuers to their location, status others on their condition or on environmental conditions, warn of issues, and so forth. However, organizations have been slower to adopt social media for crisis response. This paper explores issues affecting social media adoption by organizations for crisis response and proposes the use of know...

Social media has profound impact on society and affects many aspects of human life. Its applications in combating crises are unanticipated results of social media inventors and many lessons could be learned from its applications in combating real crises. From July 2011 to January 2012, Thailand experienced a 7-month flood disaster and more than 13.6 million people were affected. Hundreds of soc...

Can populations self-organize a crisis response? This is a field report on the first two efforts in a continuing series of exercises termed Exercise 24 or X24. These exercises attempted to demonstrate that self-organizing groups can form and respond to a crisis using low-cost social media and other emerging web technologies. P lotnick and White (2010) describe social media as generally being at...

Emergency response organizations such as the police are using social media as an additional channel to communicate with the general public in times of crisis. However, the utilization of social media with a free-style communication protocol by emergency response authorities for crisis response is still insufficiently understood. Who are the people they communicate with? What types of crisis-rel...

As noted by Seeger (2006) the notion of best practices is often use to improve professional practice; to create research and functional recommendations to use in a specific situation. This essay describes best practices in crisis communication specifically through the use of social media. It provides suggestions and approaches for improving the effectiveness of crisis communication and learning...

The use of social media services are providing solutions and new opportunities for innovative use during flood crisis events. The different tools provided by social media have proved providing many benefits in relation to protection and rescue services for governmental and civil protection. Social media services provide broader prospects for all affected by the flood threats to engage in warnin...

Crises are unpredictable events that can impact on an organisation’s viability, credibility, and reputation, and few topics have generated greater interest in communication over the past 15 years. This paper builds on early theory such as Fink (1986), and extends the crisis life-cycle theoretical model to enable a better understanding and prediction of the changes and trends of mass media cover...