Want to handle crisis communications? Use Social Media and VOST

Summer is here and forest fires have already started in Spain. It is a season when rumors spread through social media even more than during the rest of the years due to the lack of news. If during an accident like the Santiago's derailmenttrain (or any crisis of this magnitude) is important to monitor and control social media, we cannot afford putting at risk citizens now that we have ever more population because of the holiday season. 

So, If you are the authority, you’d better follow some advice:

Create the HT and push informacion as soon as possible

It is the best way to monitor and control rumors from the beginning. If you lead the crisis communications process pushing information from the very beginning of the crisis with a hashtag, it will be much easier to follow the conversation and avoid rumors.

If you have not been fast enough and citizens are using other HT use it. In case of forest fire there is a convention here in Spain, so it is simple. We use #IF (meaning forest fire), plus the name of the locality. #IIFF if you are talking about forest fires in general (how to prevent, advice, and so on).

                            

Monitor social media

Monitoring social has never been that simple by using apps, like Hoosuite, Tweetdeck and many others. We are plenty of tools and it is quite sensible to use some of them to save time and organize information, so we know what it is being said about the crisis.

Don’t forget traditional media

Social Media are just one more tool in the toolbox. It is extremely important countering criticism here because of their virality. But traditional media can help us with stopping false information if we ask them to do so. The civil protection chain includes TV, radio, on line newspapers, communication agencies and any other means to transmit the right information so long as the citizens follow them.

Use Whatsapp, direct messages in Twitter, or a traditional phone call to contact them.

Work with VOST teams

The VOST teams are also an essential part of the civil protection chain nowadays. There is no one single Emergency Communications Centre in the world capable of controlling social media if a really big catastrophe strikes, neither in Spain nor anywhere in the world.

So, count on them. VOST teams in Spain work wonderfully. We have the “Dad” account @vostSPAIN plus one account for every territory (17) and 2 more for Ceuta and Melilla.

They formed a very well-coordinated team. Working together with influential people we are fast enough (from the time being) to stop rumor spreading through the web. A WhatsApp group containing influential will be of great help, as it is here is Spain.

Don’t talk to trolls, unless it is necessary

A troll is a person who usually insults your and wants your attention because of notoriety. If you answer them you will act as an amplifier. If the troll is putting neither lives nor properties in danger ignore them. Moreover it they are people with practically no followers and no one pays attention to what they say. Don’t give them a thought, if they don’t interfere with the command and control operation to solve the crisis.

Madrid, teaching emergencies' first step

The community of Madrid will be the first territory in Spain where primary education students’ will be able to acquire knowledge in Civil Protection, Emergency, First Aid and Road Safety Education. Two years after @LuisserranoR uploaded a tweet pleading for these contents to be included in compulsory education; Madrid will include these topics in primary education next course (2014-2015).

It is a first step and we (those who participate in Edcivemerg) are proud and grateful to all who have supported the idea from the beginning: authorities, first responders, scientific societies, journalists and individuals.

Among them today I want to thank you Alcorcon’s, Mayor David Perez , who lend us the city as a testing bench, so all primary students age 12 have already been trained. My gratitude is also for the Community of Madrid, the first who will take into consideration all our objetives.

The topics will be in different subjects

It happens to me that almost every time a journalist interviews me asking for the question she or he thinks that we are talking of a new subject. So I have to explain them that what we have are several topics distributed in several subjects.

So, contents related to First Aid will be included in Science, as they are in other European countries. They also are in Civic Education as well in Physical Education. In this last case, linked to to sports-related injuries.

The Road Safety Education files are gathered in Social Sciences. Their main goal is to acquire knowledge to help consolidate and correct road behavior habits. Among the learning standards are getting to know the meaning of traffic signs; and recognizing the importance of following the rules, both as a pedestrian and as a driver.

The topics related to Civil Protection will be included in Madrid in Social Science, and they will be developed along the six years of primary education.

This said, I am sure this is only a first step and all our students will be capable, in due time, to act as first responders and save a life.

Let’s hope the rest of Spain will also include all these requirements as soon as possible.

Out of sight, out of mind?

This month I came across two very different but interesting campaigns that are making me thinking whether the saying out of sight out of mind is what we the so called first world breakfast every day. One is the fabulous exposition Programa Agua Solidaria (Water Solidarity Program) of Bomberos Unidos sin Fronteras that you can see in Puerta del Sol in Madrid till the end of April. Also caught my attention the campaings made by some NGOs to visualize children’s rights.

I've been considering if the topic was appropriate for this blog, since the topics here are related to crisis communications best practices, emergency information and social media in emergency management, and I decided I’d go ahead for one simple reason. Is there anything more urgent than preserve children’s right? I think not. What is more, children dying for lack of drinking water or due to a war (I’ll talk about Syria) should be our number one priority, since they caused as many deaths as hurricanes, tsunamis or some other disasters.

Somos agua

The Water Solidarity Program has been chosen the Best Project for Humanitarian Action in Latin America. It basically consists on the installation of water treatment plants in places where there is no drinking water. The aim is to fight against infant mortality in the Amazon. As simple as this, this program is saving the lives of very young children who die for diseases related to the ingestion of contaminated water, as William Vázquez Peña, from Iquitos, Peru, explained to me recently in Madrid.

It’s really a paradox that people living next to the Amazon, the biggest river in Peru, died for diseases related to not drinking water. Each year 6 million 600,000 children die from causes that can be prevented, according to Andres Conde, the General Director of Save the Children in Spain.

Bomberos Unidos sin Fronteras also participate in emergencies such as earthquakes, the Philippines tsunami and so on.

Out of sight… or in my own shoes?

Two more fantastic campaigns caught my attention this month and made me think on the media (traditional as well as social media) as the fifth power, so long you fit in their agenda (traditional media) and you are capable of making up a viral video. This has been the case only after leaving out images of those who were really suffering a tragedy to put in their place those who all of us can identify as my own son or daughter.

Save the children make us see Syria war with new eyes

This identification is the reason why we pay attention to the video made by Save the children with an English girl who lives a war like the Syria’s.  “People are not touched by the images of children in these situations and neither do they produce the desired effect”, explained Conde to Televisión Española (April, 14 min 27.40 in the news, in Spanish). And that’s why Save the children thought of changing the point of view.

The same applies to the video of a French girl obliged by their parents to marry an old man, even touhg it happens every day, miles away. (picture above)

So, we must be sick of reality…especially when it so far away or it’s not our concern, or so we think.

Lesson learnt from Gran Canaria false Boeing 737

@112canarias did what an emergency service should do: mobilized all they resources as an emergency was going on (according to the official information they have) and inform (using social media) of the emergency. They are not being criticized for the command and control part, but for the policy they applied with social media. So to speak: be the first source of information and monitor information, so you will avoid rumours. Where they in a rush using Twitter? Were they crying wolf? That is really what is being questioned here, not the job they did related to the emergency management.

And that is the question really. Whether @112canarias should have not rushed to share the information using social media.

It is quite easy to criticize afterwards. What it is not that simple is to be in someone else’s shoes. And it sounds to me that if they rushed to Twitter, all the rest (the mass media and some others) decided to make @112canarias a scapegoat, when they are surely not the first neither the last to make a mistake like that.

Why do these things happen? Because the new “need”, in the new landscape of social media, is to be the first. And, allow me to say, journalism is not a matter of being first but of accuracy, trusted sources and information of quality, even if you are not the first and, especially, when we are talking of emergencies.

Citizen journalism and social media

The so called “citizen journalism” is one of the reason of all this rush. But journalist should not let us get in the mainstream, since we are the professionals, while citizens armed with a smartphone are just that: ordinary citizens without the knowledge to separate the wheat from the chaff. 

Let’s not forget that no one was hurt and that @112canarias reacted very quickly to withdraw wrong information.

Imagine what could have happen if the information given have been rigth and a passenger's aeroplane have been in the middle of the sea. 

Let's analyze what happened.

At 16.01 hours @112canarias launched a message on Twitter saying : "Control confirms Canarias Ocean plane crash two miles Gran Canaria coast up to Jinámar number of passengers is unknown. " (Twitter screenshot  above)

This information had been given to them by AENA, as it's been reproduce in the tweet, so the source of information was an official one.

Fifteen minutes after that AENA claimed that it was a "false alarm ."

The photograph of a tug with a yellow crane whose profile resembled a plane landed on water contributed to the confusion. It was the same picture that had seen from earth a witness and prompted the first warning call to the emergency number112.

18 minutes later @112canarias  reported that both the Air Rescue Service (SAR ) and Air Control, as well as an emergency  helicopter confirmed that it was a  tugboat, and there wasn't any crash plane.

AENA assured that they had followed the normal protocol in case of plane crash , but in " no time " had given official notice of a possible accident.

Well...that is not what we can infer from the official conversation between AENA and the Emergency Service 112.

Moreover, AENA explained that they had to check the radar screens for a missing aircraft through the airspace of Gran Canaria.

Had they not do so, before assuring to Emergency Service 112 that there was a Boeing  737  on the ocean?

Crying wolf or making Civil Protection?

What if it  have been a real crash? What if we have had 190 people on a Boeing 737 on the ocean? We might eithe rbe mourning for victims or congratulating @112 for their swift response activating all their resources. From the point of view of command and control, they deserve an A+.

Regarding crisis communications, as @ ccajete said, we should see this mistake as an opportunity to improve.

11M, the wound of Madrid

Ten years has gone since the terrorist attacks on four trains in Madrid commuter’s network carried out by a cell of jihadist terrorists, as revealed by the police and judicial investigation. It was the second major attack in Europe up to date, with 10 near-simultaneous explosions on four trains during rush hour in the morning (between 07:36 and 07:40) and it left 191 people died and 1858 injured.

Ten years has gone and none of us, the people who live in Madrid and its suburbs, and surely in Spain, can clearly recall what we were doing exactly when the bombs exploded and all day long. Besides crying and feeling impotent, we all woke up and realized that international terrorism was also our  concern. 11-M is our painful wound, as surely September 11 is New York's wound.

Would 11-M have been different in terms of security with social media?

The answer is undoubtedly yes.

As @LuisSerranoR says in this video post (in Spanish), information would have started with a post in Twitter, so the commuters who travelled in the trains (and all the population) would have known what was going on and they would probably have the option to leave the trains before they exploded, taken into consideration that authorities could have been capable of sending updated information using Social Media.

Maybe that would have not been necessary, since authorities would have stopped the trains themselves, for security reasons. Let's remember that all communications failed, except SMS, so it was extremely difficult to know what was happening. 

Social media would have worked as a warning alert system. Not with the first explosion but probably with some of the following. Surely information would have flown much easier and it is always an empowering instrument, since it enables people to take the right decisions and diminishes uncertainty.

11M is our wound and we will never forget the victims and their families. Let’s them rest in peace and let’s hope there will never ever happen anything like that again, nowhere.  

Are we going crazy?

I can’t hardly understand why people seem to pay no attention when authorities try to make civil protection and warn citizens to follow their advice. This behavior is being repeated once and again this winter in the coast of Spain, where windstorm and heavy rain are causing waves up to 11 meters. A man died swept by a wave last February 28^th in Ondarroa (Basque Country)

It is disgrace enough that ordinary citizens do not pay attention to this serious warnings, but what is more worrying to me is that some journalist were already  swept by a wave last February 6^th in Donostia (Basque Country) despite the fact that the police were there and they have established a security cordon, whose efficiency you can judged after watching this video.

They were luckier than the citizen from Ondarroa, since they were not in the border of the duck.

A big wawe surpassed the security cordon 

As you can see in the video, two teams of journalists from the news agency EFE  and Antena 3 TV are reached by a wave in the Salamanca Paseo de Donostia while recording images. The camera operator from La Sexta tv was injured after being dragged by a wave in the Cantabrian Sea, as reported the DYA and eyewitnesses.

The victim was recording the maritime storms that hit the Bay of Biscay when a large wave jumped over the jetty and  entered the Paseo de Salamanca , dragging several people.

As a result of this heavy sea, the camera operator suffered blunt force trauma to the lower back and arm, and he ended up in Hospital.

What else do we need?

Why the emergency should be twitted

This article came to my mind after reading the post Why the emergency will not be twitted. Even though I can accept to a certain extend that data Collection should improve greatly so as to be a reliable channel of information for first responders during an emergency, I am a wholeheartedly advocate of using social media in emergencies. 

Why? Not only because they have proved to save lives (a single life may be worth the effort) but also because social media are here to stay and, as I wrote in some other posts in this blog, social media constitute ways to reach the population in emergencies and to find lost people, as we have seen so recently in Philippines. Therefore, they should be improved to enhanced emergency management, as it is been done since they started till nowadays.

The technology gap

Despite the technology gap, there are ways for people who do not have access to those means, even if internet is still expensive for them. It depends on whether there is a journalist, a humanitarian agency or any one “armed” with a smartphone or a device capable of sharing information using social media in the area. Nevertheless, even if their emergency is not tweeted “live”, there are still reasons to use social media.

If we think of Haiti and the way American Red Cross used social media for fundraising, that is to  me a good reason for using social media in the aftermath of a disaster.

“ In less than 48 hours after launching its first-ever mobile-giving campaign (Text HAITI to 90999), the American Red Cross’s plea for donations was re-Tweeted 2.3 million times. The campaign raised more than $32 million. Forty-two percent of those donors were under age 34”, as explained here. 

Of course it is still true that Internet not only is not free, neither cheap, and there is a possibility that it will never arrive to all places in the world, but  the advantages highly surpasses the disadvantages. Not to add that internet, when available, is a means to mitigate disaster response, as some communities are doing. Think of Chistchurch, Joplin or the last big catastrophe you have in mind. Sure you will find examples of social media being useful. 

Social media, one more tool in the toolbox

It is true that people rely most on the radio to get information when a disaster strikes, but it is also a fact that people use internet and social media to do so. What is more, if we have a look to the 2012 American Red Cross survey, people expect to be informed and be helped after using social media in case of disaster.

So, social media is one more tool in the toolbox, with its advantages and drawbacks, as any other tool. 

Does anyone think that the radio, tv or traditional media are perfect channels? As a journalist, I like traditional media, especially because I trust the information obtained by realiable and trusted sources and, basically, I can take for granted that information delivered in traditional media is still accurate and truthful. But we all know that communication here flows in one single direction.

We can not hear what the witness and people directly affected by a disaster can add to the story. Neither can we know what they need or where exactly they are, in case they are under debris after an earthquake, as it happened in Turkey in Ocotober 2011.

Resilience

It’s been proved that internet is much more reliable than land and mobile lines, as we have seen during Japan's earthquake and tsunami. Let’s not forget that “Social media was used to perform vital relief functions such as safety identification, displaced-persons locating, damage information provision, support for disabled individuals, volunteer organization, fund-raising, and moral support systems” after the tsunami and earthquake, as explained here, despite the fact that the Japan’s Prime Minister opened its personal Twitter account (@JPN_PMO) on March 16th, when the tsunami struck, and it reached more than 100.000 followers soon after.

Let’s remember that the Japan’s Government didn’t have a Twitter account in those days and opened it immediately.  Not to mention what a great effort they did with Google Person Finder.

The human contact

We all could agree to the fact that human contact is fundamental in a disasters situation and, as human beings we all can feel comforted by a hand on our shoulder assuring that everything will be all right after a disaster strikes. Contact eye, a supporting hand and the warm of human company is important, no need to insist on this.

Nevertheless, what it is most important to anyone in a disaster situation are two things: getting the right means (including information) to survive and to know that our loved ones are Ok, as well as letting them know that we are safe. Both means can and are achieved through social media, as people expect, according to the American Red Cross survey mentioned above. Facebook is a clear example, as I explained here, and you can see also here.

Bird covered in petrol after Gulf's oil spill 2010 ( www.huffingtonpost.com)

Psychological impact

Another issue that  is the use of grief made by traditional media, who” will often show repeated negative images: People who are dying or in distress, lacking food and water,  animals that have been abandoned, hurt, or covered in oil ,Lndscapes, such as collapsed buildings, flooded homes, or oil floating on top of water”, as explained in chapter II of  this document .

Social media are horizontal, if we need help we can ask for them directly, expressing plainly what we need (food, shelter, information) with no need to victimize ourselves or others, as well as giving information that may be helpful to first responders and humanitarian agencies.

To sum up, social media had become an integral part of disaster response whose importance, for many reasons, is undeniable to me.

If you are still not convinced, you may have a look to this article about a baby being rescued in Australia with the help of Twitter Alerts.

What do you think?