Did the Earth Move?

Never one to trivialise events or personalities (yeah right) the US West Coast had great fun with the recent East Coast earthquake. The tweetosphere was awash with barbs aimed at what the LA crowd called over reaction by the citizens of Washington and surrounds to an everyday event in California. Facebook pages and blogs were crammed with pictures of lawn furniture tipped over and captioned with hysterical statements of disaster. Even Letterman, the consummate New Yorker took the West Coast cue and described it as the most terrifying 2 seconds of his life.

As always the event (in California everything is an event) went to show the difference between the coasts in all things people related, business related and media related. California, generally the butt of East Coast jokes pertaining to anything empty and vacuous took advantage of this event but have a way to go, in regards to the number of jokes thrown at them over the years by the good people of the East.

Yet one thing they all agreed on was the extensive use of social media and its communication effectiveness in alerting danger and averting injury in catastrophes and disasters. All jokes aside, the use of Facebook and communication sites like Twitter have shown how people can help themselves and others much more effectively. The American Red Cross survey has found that 74% of people expect response agencies to answer social media calls for help, within an hour. They expect first response units to be listening to social media but that begs the question, how many sites or which sites are the ones they should have open?

“The social web is creating a fundamental shift in disaster response, one that will ask emergency managers, government agencies and aid organisations to mix time-honored expertise with real-time input from the public,” said Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern. "We need to work together to better respond to that shift.”

She also noted that among web users, "social media sites are the fourth most popular source for emergency information, just behind television news, radio and online news sites. More web users say they get their emergency information from social media than from a NOAA weather radio, government website or emergency text message system. One in five social media users also report posting eyewitness accounts of emergency events to their accounts".

As hurricane Irene creates havoc on the East Coast, Facebook is alive with pages denoting all things emergency from the Homeland Security page, Disaster Relief pages, Weather and forecast pages along with pages from the FBI and of course the Red Cross. Twitter has the @Irene site for all things hurricane related along with others including @NYMayorsoffice and @humanesociety. Between those two sites, the emergency response teams have access to people on a direct channel, who can give them updated information on the ground as well as directing emergency units with pin point accuracy. Irene will align both coasts via Social Media and deaths and injuries will be averted like no time before.

Crisis management is not something Mark Zuckerberg had in mind all those years ago while trying to impress the girls at Harvard, but thankfully the flexibility and innovation behind such media sites allow them to bend between Letterman and the Red Cross.