Social media - what's in it for us?

I've been thinking about how to get the most out of some of the social media sites, especially Twitter. I think this will become more relevant as time moves on with the Tehran riots, San Diego fires and Sichuan earthquake being examples of Twitter coming to the fore. There are a couple of quite a good videos on Ted about this… check out Evan Williams and Clay Shirky.

I'm still figuring this out myself... but Twitter is a social networking tool that allows you to share what is important to you with friends and family. Recently developments in Twitter mean that it is easy to find out what people are saying on Twitter. Twitter uses a thing called a hash tag to make searching, RSS feeds and such like more useful. A hash tag might look something like #NZCD that preceeds the message. If you subscribed tothe tag #NZCD on Twitter or your RSS feed you would be notified of all the messages that include that tag. You can also imagine that a #NICD or #SICD (North and South Island) hash tag would make it a little easier during widespread events for EM people to keep tabs on what's going on. If we could couple this with a geo-reference then we might be able to aggregate tweets (messages sent via Twitter) to specific localities.

The reason I'm putting this on the blog, rather than just doing it, is that ideally CDEM Groups would have a consistent approach to Twitter. It could be something we include in our promotions or messages during an emergency (follow us on Twitter with the hash tag…). I'm not suggesting additional work in the EOC/ECC but a means of intelligence sharing that can either come from the community or from the CDEM authorities. I'm interested in your feedback on this one.