Homeland Security and Social Media
Government always seems to be the last player to pull up a chair to the table where the game is innovation and technology. As the private sector and the public latch onto every newest wonder as they hit the net or store shelves daily the gears of bureaucracy continue to grind away slowly using dated technology and methodology. Use of social media is an aspect of both innovation and technology that government is just beginning to wake up to. Government largely continues to insist on using outdated modes of communication, however the public has moved on and isn’t coming back. We have to catch up.
Whether the issue concerns a high-risk upcoming event, an actively developing disaster, or just continuing the debate on the worldwide threat of terrorism, government needs to be engaged with the populous on homeland security issues. In order to engage with the people government needs to go where the people are instead of the old school of thought demanding the people come seek out and find their government. A good place to look for this solution is in social media.
The Pew Research Center study found 74% of online adults use social networking including 71% who use Facebook. The same study found 83% of social network users (i.e. Facebook or Twitter) were engaged in some political or social issue and nearly 2/3 had engaged in their activity using the social network. These numbers get larger when narrowing down age groups. 94% of teenagers use Facebook and have an average of 425 “friends”. Looking at older age groups these numbers obviously get a lot smaller. However, the trend is to a connected populous with the vast majority engaged in social media. This trend will only continue with each passing year. Social media is where government needs to be engaging with the public.
Some areas of government are already delving into social media. By now most government entities of any size probably have a Facebook page and some even have Twitter. Lessons have been learned from recent events demonstrating the value of government engaging with social media. Emergency Management has identified focused social media use as a top 5 important trend for 2014 noting, “Boston and New York City learned the value of a concentrated effort to leverage social media use among citizens to inform and calm the populous during a disaster…. have paid dividends already, including during a February 2013 blizzard and the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Media reports were so varied and inaccurate in the aftermath of the bombings that Boston Police Department tweets, in effect, became the official word during and after the incident.”
In the State of Florida the Florida State University Emergency Management and Homeland Security Program has committed resources to educating government about engaging in social media and also to supporting government in this endeavor in times of crisis. The FSU program is called the Virtual Operations Support Team. The VOST has stood up during emergency events such as hurricanes and found that they were able to both receive and send valuable information to the public who had no electricity, no TV, and no radio, but they had smartphones and were on Twitter. FSU provides a presentation on their VOST team found below. The VOST teams use a range of social media apps to collect valuable information during crises such as hootsuite (an integrated dashboard of multiple social media applications), Ushahidi (a crowdsourcing app with map overlay capability), and Geofeedia (another aggregating social media tool with mapping). These are all excellent apps that any Agency can and should be using to take full benefit of social media in emergency situations.
Government is way behind the curve in becoming engaged with social media as an effective tool for communicating with their customers. Public safety agencies are just beginning to delve into this arena and are finding positive results. Government entities in the homeland security realm should be using social networking to reach and engage with a wider spectrum of Americans.
