What does it mean when your locals emergency managers avoid socialmedia- UPDATED

I have continued to look into how my local government is responding to this urgent issue.  I would like everyone to know that I have since learned that it is not the agency that is unwilling to respond it's our elected officials. Specifically Phil Mendelson the Council member in charge of the Nation's Capitol city Public Safety Committee.

I really hit home for me after a recent spate of natural disasters and the Council member  was quoted in the press saying: "Cell phone are useless in emergencies."    This shows me that will the sweeping changes that have already happen in public safety --the public leadership in my District need to change.

I would also like to apologize  to the folks in the District's agency's that are trying to do the public's work while our leadership fails to understand the changes that have already happened.

In the Nation's capital the last two days we have



had several of our Public Schools targeted with a campaign to send some kind of white substance in letters to them.

During all of this the local emergency agencies not only failed to address it the media and various social media citizens took it upon themselves to fill in the gap.

So citizens are left with offical Gov agencies that aren't the Emergency Managmement office giving out info like this

and again DC' Emergency Managment Agency

And Citizens with their own alerts

This is just un acceptable in the Nation's Capitol

Who's Cloud are you on?

"Within an hour, more than 1,200 tweets a minute were coming from Tokyo. By the end of Friday, American time, a total of 246,075 Twitter posts using the term "earthquake" had been posted."
Telegraph.co.uk




This number is staggering and it suggest a socmedia tsunami is heading to your EOC sometime soon.


This brings up a number of issues that are going to need to be adressed and I hope to see the folks in CrisisMedia and SMEM start to talk about them.  Namely Bandwidth and Who's Cloud are you on.  There is no way any single EOC computer system can handle this demand load. Right now we need to be developing a frame work of how to get some of the biggest EMA down to the smallest on to a secure cloud.   


I will not be surprised in the after action reports to see that most of the Japan's local emergency management IT network was unable to stay online or handle the load.  There is only one scalable on demand solutions that is available without going to customer supports and that exist on the cloud.


I think it is incumbent upon those of us in the CrisisData world to push this issues.   And here is the 1 fact you need to know to support this statement of mine. 100 percent of social media is on the CLOUD.

Welcome to our blog about Crisis Data.

As we migrate from our analog world to this new digital dimension the rise of the Social Media Citizens naturally turned them into Digital Crisis Responders as well as consumers.

Since we have government and entertainment industry clients @HastatusLLC  We can say that @govs are way ahead. It's our experience from working in emergency response as both consultants to government and as member/trainer in our local CERT program that the front line of interaction with citizens in extreme times make this the case.


Sure it's an emergency and nothing creates change like them right ~ So agencies, responders, and social media citizens are adopting to these new connections FIRST.  Since they encounter them head on with every hazard, every day responders have no shortage of incoming request for aid, information and services.  Mean while in the non emergency world a popular expression is being posted on socialmedia and sums up their opposite problem.

"Marketing is for companies that don't have advocates"

Since entertainment and marketing in general has this opposite problem in that they to create a "need".  Mother nature and man creates needs some times multi- needs in the same day for responders.  All of which the citizens expect that responders and their agencies will adopt to these changes at the speed and agility of the marketeers are displaying as they work on ways to get folks to visit their social media offerings.


So this all sets consumer expectation very high and their views moves now at the speed of thought to blogs, facebook or tweets and it will be a must for every type of agency/responder to be there now, and also be on the lookout for new channels from the citizens as this too will happen and to of course deal with the crisis data as a whole.

We'll use this blog to talk about this new world of Crisis Data and how it will work on the cloud that has formed to support all of this and what it means to each of us on a number of issues.