WK 8 - Crowd Sourcing in times of crisis
In a time of crisis or natural disaster, I could only imagine how people would be feeling and what would be going through their mind.
What should I be doing? How can I stay safe? Who can help me?
With all these questions going through their mind, as a media student the first thing I would do, is resort to is my social media accounts for help and I guess I’d try to remain calm????
Now days social media has particularly played a huge affect on the wellbeing of many people going through natural disasters or a crisis. To relate to Australia specifically, in 2011, in Queensland, there were the Queensland floods which left “200,000 people affected” (Creighton, 2016) and had the Brisbane City Council have to deal with “AUD $440 million which was spent on the recovery effort” (Creighton, 2016). The people of QLD quickly turned to their social media accounts and a hashtag, #QLDFloods was then made trending on Twitter with “35,000 tweets containing the hashtag” (Bruns, 2012). The hashtag was effectively used as a source of information and helped many of Australia’s Twitter users share information. Approximately, “50-60% of #qldfloods messages were retweets” (Bruns, 2012) which were to essentially share information and regular updates with their followers.
I personally believe this is a great idea, and I’m glad that now if there were any times of crisis, it will be easy to access information. Although, now that I think of it, I don’t actually have a Twitter account and only a handful of Australians do as well, or at least it is common that Twitter “has a considerable churn rate of new users signing up but then never using the service” (Cowling, 2017) with only “2.8 million active users” (Cowling, 2017) in comparison to the 16 million active users on Facebook.
Well, luckily Facebook has also developed their own forms of crisis management. They have also gotten on board with the hashtag feature, similar to Twitter and have developed a Safety Check method, where users are able to mark that they’re safe to reassure family and friends on their Facebook account, who may have any concerns with their well-being after the disaster and will then be notified that they are okay and safe.
As well as that, Facebook have also introduced a crisis management technique which makes people constantly able to access links to Aid websites, to promote donations and be able to help countries who have been affected and who may need the help or as much as they can get. In example, when the Typhoon struck the Philippines or when Japan was hit with the massive 8.4 Earthquake and Tsunami, Facebook had ads shared onto the top of everyones Facebook newsfeed asking for donations.
Below is a great video I found that pretty much sums up how social media has been helpful in these times of need and in what ways.
Sources:
Cowling, D. (2017). Social Media Statistics Australia – January 2017. [online] Socialmedianews.com.au. Available at: https://www.socialmedianews.com.au/social-media-statistics-australia-january-2017/ [Accessed 21 May 2017].
Creighton, D. (2016). Queensland's 2011 floods by the numbers. [online] Brisbane Times. Available at: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/queensland-floods-2011-the-floods-by-the-numbers-20160112-gm4czk.html [Accessed 21 May 2017].
Executive Summary: ‘#qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods’, pp 7-10. Bruns, A., Burgess, J., Crawford, K., Shaw, F. (2012)
