Social Media Use During Emergency Response - Insights from Emergency Professionals

This paper analyzes issues in organizational needs for extracting information from social media during emergency response. By interviewing 16 Canadian emergency professionals, we gained insight into such things as: how they currently monitor social media; what types of information they are interested in, what challenges they encounter and what strategies they use to overcome those challenges. The most frequent requirements mentioned by participant were the need for prioritization and categorization of social media data to mitigate information overload. These professionals are also concerned about the reliability of information and counteracting the rumors.