It’s not just a “Social” Revolution
Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 9:40AM Every day here at the County, we Tweet out news on Twitter and post information on Facebook. We’ve been doing that since early 2009.
But last month, when the entire region was suddenly blacked out, our County’s social media took on a whole new importance.
Frankly, the latest emergency, which was the first aside from H1N1 that we’ve dealt with since we started using social media, proved that all of us should be following the County’s Twitter and Facebook posts.
Our county is no stranger to disaster or disaster response, but the September blackout was a scenario that I don’t think many of us had imagined.
Without warning the lights, TVs, computers, businesses, offices and homes of five million people suddenly stopped working.
Information is the first thing all of us immediately want whenever an emergency occurs. We want to know, “What’s going on?” and, “What do I need to do?”
Well, with all the electricity off, you were hard pressed to find any information Sept. 8, even though we and other agencies were working hard to disseminate it.
If you had a battery-powered radio, or were sitting in your car, you could listen to updates from KOGO AM 600, the region’s primary disaster information radio station.
But there was another really important conduit of information. Everywhere that cellular phones were working, people were able to receive immediate updates from our County’s Twitter and Facebook pages, through smart phone applications or through text messages (you can receive County tweets as a text message on your mobile phone by texting “follow SandiegoCounty” to 40404.)
We tweeted 16 messages and posted seven Facebook updates in the earliest hours of the blackout, between the time the lights shut off just after 3:30 p.m., and when Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Horn and San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders held their joint press conference at 8 p.m. in the County’s Emergency Operations Center.
We told folks that the EOC had been activated; the blackout was expected to last a long time; traffic lights were out; the Highway Patrol was conducting traffic control and that residents should not call 911. We sent out food safety tips and updates from SDG&E. We also provided live tweets from the press conference with the latest info about what happened and what was being done.
By the end of the first 24 hours of the emergency, we had tweeted out 123 updates, letting the public know that schools would be closed, certain water districts needed to conserve water, that County and City employees were expected to come in to work, and other important information.
This year has been an eye-opening testimony to the growing power of social media all around. Political experts have universally agreed that social media helped organize political dissent in Egypt’s and Tunisia’s “Arab Spring” democracy movements. In August, the Pew Research Center released a study finding that 65 percent of adult Internet users reported being part of some social networking site — an increase of 61 percent from 2010 and more than double the 29 percent that was reported just three years ago.
The bottom line is social media systems aren’t just social. They’re powerful communications tools too, especially in emergencies. And, more and more people are using them and you don’t want to be left out.
If you’re not following the County’s Twitter and Facebook pages, you should be.
Reader Comments (1)
thx for the texting info. I was following san dieigo county in both twitter & facebook during blackout but wasn't set up for receiving by text. even if we never blackout again... I'm following by receiving text just in case.