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Like many of us in the security risk profession, media outlets and blogs took careful note of the novel ways social media tools were employed in two high-profile emergencies earlier in the month: the hostage standoff at Discovery headquarters near Washington DC and the gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, California.

On the whole, the writers have been less skeptical about the role and utility of raw data from Twitter feeds and their ilk than we were in our recent post on the Discovery incident.

Here’s a small sampling of what others have been saying since the two events happened.

Federal Computer Week notes that emergency management, “once the province of official channels, is going where the people are.” It lists “5 ways to use social media for better emergency response,” including:
1. Reaching a wider audience by having “a presence on Facebook and Twitter and … moving onto YouTube as a way to disseminate information about emergency preparedness,” augmenting more traditional alert services;
2. Making emergency alerts two-way;
3. Monitoring the tweets and messages of emergency management agencies via social media channels “to know what’s going on”;
4. Integrating social media data sources to produce “a Web-based common operating picture”; and
5. Using “social media and Web 2.0 technologies [to] improve collaboration among defense, civilian and nongovernmental agencies during disasters.”

Mapping tools feature prominently in a number of blog posts on both incidents. A blogger with Off the Map, from mapping firm FortiusOne, built a bounded location search for tweets around Discovery headquarters the afternoon of the incident, using the Twittering Stream API, and published the results the following morning.

At the opposite end of the country just over week later, according to SMSEO, Google launched a resource map to assist those affected by the San Bruno explosion and subsequent fire (photo right). (The home offices of Google-owned YouTube are about two miles from where the explosion occurred). All Hazards bloggers went one step further and augmented the Google map with an array of additional resources for those affected by the blast.

Awareness of social media tools is no longer the challenge among government agencies at the federal, state and locals levels; it’s how to use them. And in a few cases some interesting things are being tried. For example, Government Computer News reported over the summer about one such widget project at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Discovery and San Bruno incidents are merely the latest reasons for FEMA and other agencies to continue their explorations of social media tools.

(Photo courtesy of California Beat, credited to Twitpic via @brian305)

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