Social Media and its Impact on Crisis Communication: Case Studies of Twitter Use in Emergency Management in Australia and New Zealand Paper presented to Communication and Social Transformation, ICA Regional Conference, Shanghai, China, 8-10 November 2013

1. Social Media and its Impact on Crisis
Communication: Case Studies of Twitter
Use in Emergency Management in
Australia and New Zealand
Paper presented to Communication and Social Transformation,
ICA Regional Conference, Shanghai, China, 8-10 November 2013.
Terry Flew, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia; ARC Centre
of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
Axel Bruns, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia; ARC
Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
Jean Burgess, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia; ARC
Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
Kate Crawford, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, Mass., USA
Frances Shaw, Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney.

2. Social Media and Crisis Communication
project
• Project on social media and crisis communication with
Queensland Department of Community Services and
EIDOS Institute as partners
• Funded through Australian Research Council LinkageProjects program
• Project combines:
– Large-scale quantitative social media tracking and analysis
– Qualitative cultural analysis of communications strategies
of organisations
– Aim to enable both emergency management authorities
and news media organisations to better use social media
in crisis/emergency communication

3. Case studies
January 2011 floods in
Brisbane and South-East
Queensland, Australia
February 2011
earthquake in
Christchurch, New
Zealand

4. • “As social media becomes more a part of our daily lives,
people are turning to it during emergencies as well. We
need to utilize these tools, to the best of our abilities, to
engage and inform the public, because no matter how
much … officials do, we will only be successful if the
public is brought in as part of the team.”
Craig Fugate, Director, International Association of
Emergency Managers (IAEM), 2010).

5. Key Issues with Social Media in Cries
1. Authority and trust: ability to deliver timely information
that is reliable for affected populations – minimising
misinformation
2. Coordination: maximising reach and effectiveness of
messages to affected populations while avoiding
duplication and mixed messages
3. How can emergency management and media work in
effective combination?

6. Key Project Innovations
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Applying data mining and analysis techniques to an investigation
of the uses of social media in crisis communication;
Combining computer-aided quantitative techniques with in-depth
qualitative analysis to examine communicative and community
practices in ad hoc online publics formed around the shared
experience of a natural disaster;
Developing the tools for a near real-time tracking, analysis, and
visualisation of public communication about unfolding disaster
events in social media spaces;
Establishing detailed comparative metrics to provide a clear
understanding of social media uses in different emergency
contexts;
Working with emergency management organisations to develop,
implement, and evaluate, through an iterative process, advanced
strategies for the use of social media by emergency and media
organisations during natural disasters.

7. Brisbane floods and Twitter
• Why Twitter?
1.
2.
3.
4.
Simple network
structure
Public/private only
(different to Facebook)
Ability to „listen in‟
(Crawford) to a variety
of accounts
Relatively
straightforward to
archive messages
• More than 35,000 tweets
contained hashtag
#qldfloods during 10-16
January, 2013

8. #qldfloods tweets 10-16 Jan 2013

9. #qldfloods tweets and unique
users per day, 10-16 Jan2011

10. Most visible contributors to #qldfloods, 10-16
January, 2011

11. Lessons for emergency managers
• their network of followers, and the followers of the
hashtags which are used in individual tweets, constitute
important partners in disseminating information more
widely than is possible for these services alone;
• to maximise the possibility of retweeting, messages
should be designed to be passed along easily (e.g. by
leaving space in the tweet for adding „RT @username‟),
and should contain hashtags relevant to the topic.

12. @QPS Media
• Queensland Police Service Media Unit
• Dedicated social media division within QPS
• Innovations within the #qldfloods period e.g. #Mythbuster
tweets to address false rumours

13. Coding of @QPSMedia tweets
1. Information
–
–
–
A: Advice
S: Situational
information
R: Requests for
information
2. Media sharing
–
–
NM: News Media
MM: Multimedia
3. Help and fundraising
–
–
H: Help
F: Fundraising
4. Direct experience
– PNE: personal narrative
and eyewitness reports
5. Reactions and
discussions
–
–
–
–
–
AD: Adjunctive
discussion
PR: Personal reaction
T: Thanks
SP: Support
META: Meta-discussion

14. #qldfloods tweet types over time, 9-17 January,
2011

15. @QPSMedia tweets and #qldfloods general tweets
• general uses of #qldfloods and specific conversations
around the @QPSMedia account differed quite considerably
• whereas activity in the hashtag #qldfloods shows a fairly
even distribution of tweet types, activities around
@QPSmedia overwhelmingly consisted of Information
tweets, complemented by a much smaller number of Media
Sharing tweets
• @QPSMedia was successful in reaching its target audience,
and that audience treated the account with considerable
care and respect
• @QPSMedia tweets themselves were appropriate to the
task at hand, containing timely and relevant information
• Responses to @QPSMedia, in turn, remained consistently
constructive and on-topic

16. Christchurch, NZ earthquake,
February 22, 2013
• Nearly 200 fatalities
• Followed Sept. 2010
earthquake – weakened
building structures
• #eqnz hashtag established
after Sept. 2010 quake
• Twitter as medium for
“ambient journalism” (Alfred
Hermida) – platform lies
dormant for long periods
and then is suddenly
activated

17. Volume and type of #eqnz tweets,
22 Feb – 7 March, 2011

18. Most active #eqnz tweeters

19. Decline in unique users

20. Conclusions
• Two-way, interactive nature of social media (e.g. Twitter)
offers important advances on traditional communication
channels
• Can capture on-the-ground public intelligence
• Complementary to broadcast and other mass media
• Emergency services divisions themselves become
media communicators (e.g. QPS Media)
• Key is to be both a trusted information source and to
actively engage the public as co-creators of relevant
media and informational content

21. Thank you!
Full paper available at http://eprints.qut.edu.au/63707/.