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Twitter and Facebook lead the way following massive earthquake
Social media has been at the forefront of crisis communications during every disaster in recent memory, and this trend has continued in the aftermath of the massive earthquake in Japan. In an article for Mashable.com, Sarah Kessler described the various ways people are getting connected:
Google often creates Person Finder sites during emergencies that allow people to leave information about their whereabouts or information about a missing person. At the time of writing, there were about 158,700 records for Japan — more than 140,000 more records than were submitted to the last such site it set up for the victims of the Christchurch earthquake in February.
The Red Cross site operates in a similar manner, publishing a list of names with contact information of people who want to make it known that they are alive and people whose relatives have indicated they are missing.
But perhaps the most simple method people in Japan have turned to for connecting with loved ones throughout the emergency is posting to their social media accounts. Less than an hour after the quake, the number of tweets from Tokyo topped 1,200 per minute, according to Tweet-o-Meter. An interactive graphic created by Facebook to illustrate status updates related to the quake shows Japan’s activity on Facebook during that day was also high.
Hopefully the grizzled veterans at the Red Cross will eventually combine their experience with the tech prodigies at Google to further improve and advance the ability for people to both get in touch and find or request emergency services despite downed telephone lines or power outages. With incredible stats like 1,200 tweets per minute out of Tokyo, the demand is obviously there.
Applying this to business, you could be left in a similar situation following a disaster, natural or otherwise. How would you communicate with employees and, if possible, keep business running? One minimal solution is to establish and maintain a list of Twitter accounts, while more involved solutions often involve things like employee-only message boards or Internet workstations. Regardless of what your solution is, educate and practice with everyone involved to ensure that things will run smoothly, even in the midst of a crisis.
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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]
