Here in Boulder County, early this year we had a wildfire that caused
the evacuation of a large area - one home (one farm, actually) ended up
destroyed, but many, many more were threatened.  We've been using
Twitter to release links to news releases for about a year, and suddenly
people in the evacuation area were using twitter on their cell phones to
follow the announcements from the Sheriff.  Then the media started
following his tweets and in the space of one day, I was told that the
number of followers for the county quadrupled.  So yes, it can be used
as an important tool for crisis.  Like all such tools, the bigger the
crisis, the more overwhelmed the tool can get, but for something like
this wildfire, it turned from an afterthought to an important tool in
the space of a few hours.

David R. McLallen 
Information Technology/Records Management 
P.O. Box 471 
Boulder CO 80306 
303-413-7788 
Fax: 303-441-3983 
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Carol Choksy
> Sent: Friday, July 10, 2009 5:43 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [RM] Social Media Research
> 
> I've spent the past month tracking social media concerning the Iranian
> elections as a sort of experiment to see if I could figure out a way
to
> capture the "conversation" as it evolves. The results are mixed,
> particularly when the tweets exceed 200,000 per hour and are running
by
> so
> fast one cannot even keep up. Besides the problems of sorting fact,
> rumor,
> and the ever-present problem of analysts expressing opinions as facts,
> it
> looks like it's possible, but only on something on a smaller scale and
> with
> lots of rules. For example, could you do something like this for a
> company
> during a disaster, assuming the phone system and cell towers were
still
> up?
> 
> 
> 
> I still have lots of questions and wonder what your ideas are on this?

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