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It was an all-too familiar scene: a lone gunman entered an office building, took hostages and threatenened lives. Hardly typical, though, was that news of the event first broke on Twitter and other social media. Can emergency managers harness this potent capability? They’re already trying. But should they be?

On September 1, 2010, gunman James Lee entered Discovery Communications’ corporate headquarters just outside Washington DC and took three hostages before being killed by police. Although such scenarios have played out multiple times in the past, The Washington Post reports a unique twist to this event: it was first communicated to the public by the public, via Twitter and other social media outlets. Twitter was also the source of continuous real-time updates as the incident unfolded, most of them neatly aggregated under the hashtag “#Discovery.”

Monitoring and harnessing information from social media sites is a growing trend in the emergency management community. There seems to be a rush not only to capture the flood of information streaming from these media, but also to do something useful with it.

The question we would ask is: what constitutes ‘useful’?

Even a cursory look at tweets from the Discovery incident clearly shows how the data could be a valuable risk communication tool. But we should also recognize the limitations of the data sources, and take corresponding steps that will clearly define the extent to which they can be rendered sufficiently consistent and reliable – in other words to make them truly useful.

Here are some questions that need to be addressed:

• How quickly can misinformation be corrected?
• What are the costs and benefits of fast information versus accurate information?
• How can quality information be equitably distributed to affected populations?

Raw information feeds such as Twitter provide a rich trove of real-time data on a wide array of mission-critical questions. But there should be a way for that data to be rapidly vetted and analyzed in context before social media can become truly effective tools for emergency response, risk communication or threat warning dissemination. (Image courtesy of: yfrog.)

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