More than a week has gone since a passengers' train
derailed in Santiago de Compostela (North Spain), causing at least 79 death
people and more than 100 injured. Despite the fact that Galicia 112 Twitter
account was not operating and @Xunta shared
its first message 50 minutes after the derailment, social media proved
an effective way to inform about the incident and, what is more, VOST teams as
well as local influencers were capable
of countering criticisms, helped spreading the right information and cooperated
intensely to stop a bad habit in Twitter: uploading pictures where injured or dead people are
shown with no respect to the victims’
intimacy. Citizens also used Twitter to ask for help to find their loved ones,
sharing pictures with birthmarks, tattoos or some other physical description to
facilitate the task and asking for a RT.
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| @VOSTSpain beware their followers not to rumors into consideration |
Let’s
try to analyze how authorities used social media here, what they did well and
what improvements could have been possible.
First
of all, it is a pity that the official account @112Galicia is still not
working. The account is set in Twitter. It has 104 followers but, for the time
being, it has not been used, despite the fact that there are very good and
qualified journalists working in Galicia 112 capable of managing it. The local
authorities may know why they lost this chance to inform citizens directly using
an official and credible source.
@Xunta, almost an hour to inform
@Xunta,
the official account of the local Government, did try their best to cope with
the situation. Before going on, I’d like to point out that they are not
specialist in crisis communications. The
information delivered was accurate and useful, but it was a bit too slow. The
train derailment happened at 20.41 on Wednesday 24th. @Xunta wrote its
first tweet at 22.24. 50 minutes late and only to say that they would offer
official information soon.
It
took then 20 more minutes to say blood was needed (22.44). In the meantime,
people were sending messages about this issue and it was really a bit difficult
to be certain whether it was best to go to hospital to donate blood or to stay
home and leave the roads free for emergency services because messages saying
one thing and the opposite were simultaneous.
The
donating blood issue was to me, a fail, saved, partially, thanks to the National
Police account @policia , who put a bit or order here.
Using hashtags to follow the conversation
@Xunta,
the official account with more than 27.000 followers didn’t create a hashtag to
follow neither they use any to facilitate following the conversation. If you
wanted to know what they were saying in Twitter the best way was to add a
column in Hootsuite or TweetDeck. The problem to me was simple: lack of expertise,
besides the obvious fact that they were overwhelmed by the tragedy.
Despite
the delay and the confusion, @Xunta provided useful information helped by VOST
teams, like @VOSTGalicia, @VOSTSpain, many influencers using their personal
profiles and @112cmadrid, the official account of 112 in Madrid. The later seemed
to turned into the official 112 voice in the absence of @112Galicia and,
probably, due to the insufficiente response's capacity of @Xunta.
Up to 3 different phone numbers to search
information
The
information phone numbers issue was as well a failure. I founded at least 3
different
(I’ve
been told that there were up to 5).
Nonetheless,
I don’t like to finish this article
without pointing out that @Xunta did their best and that, despite all possible
improvements, they managed the situation quite well considering, as I already
said, that it is not their duty to handle crisis communication.
I
also want to remark that I am very proud of how voluntary services as well as
ordinary citizens reacted to this tragedy, offering all the help they could, in
the derailment's scenario, and using social media.
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| José Sieyro, President of Caldas Civil Protection having a rest on the railway after working all night |
