Social Media in Emergency Management: Using Conferences as Safe Exercise Opportunities   [open pdf - 115KB]

"During the weekend of Friday, March 1 through Sunday, March 3, 2013 California Volunteers, Anaheim CERT [Community Emergency Response Team] and a team of Virtual Operation Support Team (VOST) volunteers helped to conduct a social media exercise during the California State CERT Conference. There were 129 distinct twitter handles in use during the conference on the #CalCERT hashtag for twitter, which represents approximately 32% of the attendees. The conference exercise produced the following social media activity: 954 posts, 131,475 reach and 822,917 timeline deliveries. The importance of creating safe exercise opportunities in a live social media environment was the key lessoned learned. Repeated exercises in the future should structure tasks based on behavioral measures and provide a team orientation and briefing prior to delving into the online exercise environment."