Social Media Use in Crises and Risks: An Introduction to the Collection

Part 1 Using Social Media in Risks and Crises

In Part 1, we present empirical studies of three different cases. In particular, we analyse social media use during the terrorist attacks in Norway. In five consecutive chapters, we analyse how communicators in different roles – ranging from victims to crisis managers/responders and journalists – not only used social media, but what the disastrous 22 July event implies for their current application of social media in daily communication or crisis communication. This part also includes a chapter investigating social media use by journalists during the 2014–2015 Ebola crisis as well as a case study on online communication during the 2013 floods in Austria.

The first chapter of Part 1 provides an analysis of how Twitter was used during and in the aftermath of the Norway terrorist attack in 2011. Based on a collected material of 2.2 million messages from the Norwegian Twitter sphere during and after the attacks, the analysis assesses how the micro-blogging service aided its users in creating awareness of the crisis event. A striking feature of the material is the absence of police, fire brigades and other public institutions from the key communicators. The study confirms previous research that highlights the importance of crowdsourcing and the efforts by amateurs in Twitter communication about sudden crises. The results show that Twitter was important for establishing situation awareness both during and after the terrorist attacks; that hashtags were of limited value in the critical phase and that unexpected actors became important communicators.

The author of the second chapter has interviewed surviving victims of the terror attack on the island of Utøya, and studied their use of Facebook in the first month after the shootings. Using Narrative Therapy as an inspiration for her analysis, the author finds that the perpetrator is excluded from the survivors’ traumatic stories. On their Facebook walls, and in the interviews, they display rather their personal renarrations of fear, shock, resilience and their will to support each other in finding a way to move on.

The analysis in the following chapter of the authorities’ use of Twitter during the Norway attacks (Chapter 3) testifies to the absence of official voices during the critical hours of the crisis, with the blood bank at Oslo University Hospital as the exception. The analysis reveals that there was no coordination and synchronisation of communication between the authorities. The authors infer that official silence on Twitter obstructed an efficient configuration of situation awareness for the public and the authorities. However, the analysis also points to the potential of Twitter in crises, by emphasising how the blood bank used tweets to raise situation awareness in collaboration with the public, and to mobilise blood donors in order to address the acute problem of a shortage of blood to treat casualties.

Chapter 4 follows up on these issues by interviewing crisis managers and responders in the Norwegian police and health sector, and by paying particular attention to lessons they have drawn from the inadequate use during the 2011 attacks. The police interviewees underline how they currently have established routines for engaging social media in daily communication activities to strengthen their public presence, so that they are better prepared for effective social media use during crises. The health sector interviewees used social media to some extent when the crisis unfolded. However, like the police interviewees they stress the need for better coordination between actors in their own sector and also between emergency services in other sectors.

Based on interviews with news workers, photographers, desk editors and front editors at VG, the leading online news provider in Norway, Chapter 5 discusses whether and how media workers and managers take advantage of digital technology and social media. The study looks at how two different discourses of professionalism, the occupational and the organisational discourse, informed journalists’ use of digital media’s affordances during the terror crisis in Norway. It analyses how online journalists and management reflect upon their use of the affordances five years after the crises. The affordances of digital media may be seen, for example, as interactivity with users, the speed of digital media, social media platforms and real-time chatting. Although new organisations in the current digital and social media climate find they have less control over agenda setting, they compensate for this through various enhanced forms of news presentation, such as interactive graphics, that engage users. At the same time, management looks to social media platforms for financial opportunities by learning from, and innovating with and alongside them.

Chapter 6 follows up on the topic of news media’s use of social media by examining the manner in which three UK media sources – the BBC, the Daily Mail and The Guardian – used Twitter during the 2014–2015 Ebola crisis. The chapter’s key research question concerns how these established media used and responded to the distinctive nature of social media during the Ebola outbreak. The author finds that these media used social media in a fairly conservative manner. Content was largely factual, occasionally opinion led, but always signposted to stories elsewhere – suggesting that Twitter was not seen as a medium in its own right, but as a means of promoting content elsewhere. Moreover, there was no exploitation of the dialogical potential of social media.

The authors of Chapter 7 use the 20 semi-structured interviews they conducted, and an analysis of online data, to reconstruct the online communication of different stakeholders such as the authorities, rescue organisations and journalists during the 2013 European floods in Austria. They conclude that social media was a weak point in official crisis management and communication related to the floods. A flood has a long lead time and is therefore easy to predict compared with other crises such as terror attacks. Nevertheless, rescue organisations, the authorities and journalists were surprised by the enormous impact of the floods, in particular with the new flows of online information, and the more active and prominent role of the public in crisis communication.

Part 2 Developing a Tool for Crisis Communicators

The two chapters in this section show how user-centred design and usability testing are vital components in developing technological tools for occupational groups who work in monitoring, assessing, identifying and sharing important social media content during crises. Few of the many new tools developed to monitor and assess social media content are actually used by key communicators in crisis and risk situations. This is partly due to a lack of usability testing and cooperation with potential end-users in the design phase of the tool development. Chapter 8 focuses on how usability testing in controlled laboratory studies was applied when developing a tool for gathering social media information, from the pre-production planning phase to the final phase. Chapter 9 pays particular attention to how biometric measurements (e.g. skin conductance and eye tracking) can provide detailed clues about a tool’s usability. The authors conclude that these measurements are helpful when trying to identify and understand the user’s emotional and cognitive reactions to tool features. The two chapters in this part offer insights into how research and technological innovation may go hand in hand in the design of new tools.

Part 3 Recommendations for Social Media Use in Risks and Crises

Based on the empirical studies presented in Part 1 of the book, on studies published by the RESCUE researchers in other scholarly publications, and on previous research and theories on social media use in crises, the chapters in the last section of the book offer recommendations to key communicators in their application of these media in different types of risk and crises.

Chapter 10 summarises communication processes during the central European floods in Austria and the insufficient use of social media by the authorities and rescue organisations during the crisis. The authors recommend that professional communicators develop a proactive communication and publishing strategy that provides information already in the pre-crisis phase, to avoid accelerating the dissemination of misleading information on social media. They also recommend that crisis communicators develop a content strategy for social media communication that can help them understand the kind of content their audience needs, together with the tone and voice used in their content. Finally, they emphasise the importance of training communicators to develop practical skills in dealing with social media platforms and communication processes.

In the following chapter (11), the recommendations are based on findings from two sets of case studies: one on the use of social media by health authorities in the UK and Norway during the 2014–2015 Ebola outbreak; the other on how established media in the UK used Twitter during the Ebola outbreak. The recommendations for health authorities emphasise, for instance, how they need to develop a strong social media presence and monitor the wider social media conversations in order to deal with rumours and questions; furthermore, that they can use messengers with local authority to offer advice via social media to people in affected regions when urgent measures need to be taken. As for the established media, one of the suggestions is that, where social media content is signposted, journalists should consider signposting to primary sources rather than to their own reports.

In the final chapter, the authors’ recommendations are based on findings from the Norwegian Twitter sphere and newspaper content, and from interviews with Utøya survivors, journalists, information officers, crisis managers and responders. Among the recommendations offered for the different key communicators are: acknowledge social media as important; master cross-social media monitoring and features; be aware of non-hashtagged content; implement verification tools and practices; and, last but not least, engage with and learn from celebrities.