Social Media and Crisis Management

At 6:54 pm on Wednesday, July 13 the first of three explosions erupted in Mumbai—with the explosions targeting the city’s Opera House district, its Zaveri bazaar, and the central Dadar area in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks. Amidst the confusion, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter saw statuses and tweets providing real-time updates for concerned citizens.

By 7:30 pm, a series of useful phone numbers for contacting hard to reach friends was posted to the Mumbai Help blog and links to an editable Google Docs spreadsheet was circulated on Twitter with information of “names, addresses ad phone numbers of people offering their houses as a refuge to those left stranded.”[1]

These online forums allowed individuals from all over India to set up information sites in a collective and organized location to provide some order to the crisis situation. Nitin Sagar, an IT engineer in Delhi 720 miles away from Mumbai, created the Google Doc said much of the information begain getting lost in the “Twitter timeline,” so “he aggregated some of the names and phone numbers of people volunteering to help in a spreadsheet [and] re-tweeted to help funnel missed phone numbers from Twitter messages into a single page”[2] He was able to use the quick updates provided by Twitter and Facebook, and organize them in a user friendly and helpful manner.

Similarly, Ajay Kumar, a software engineer in Luknow (also 720 miles away from Mumbai) created a disaster tracker map that provided links to “useful reports such as traffic updates, death toll, blood donors, [and] hospital phone numbers”[3] based on where you clicked the color-coded dots on the map, on Ushahidi a website that allows users to crowdsource crisis information. He aggregated information from Twitter based on hashtags such as #here2help, #needhelp, and #MumbaiBlasts, where he sifted through to find the most timely and accurate information to include in his updates. The power of Twitter in the aftermath of the explosions is visually evident on this map compiled by The Guardian newspaper. It tracks the tweets from the Mumbai area using the #Mumbaiblasts hashtag.[4]

I personally checked Facebook multiple times in the day, just to read the updates posted by my family members in Mumbai. My family in America had a difficult time contacting people via telephone because of the increased usage, so we turned to social media sites to get in touch with them. My cousins and friends in India posted statuses such as “Sab theek hai ghar pe” (everything is okay at home) and “we’re safe” as the quickest way of relaying their safety.  

I think this efficient use of social media sites is truly powerful; this situation showed that social media is an important tool for crisis management in its most rapid form. Before information and communication technologies, the real time relay of information to people around the world was convoluted and nearly impossible. In the age of instant communication, information is spread across the globe in seconds. Although this rapid-fire form of communication is more easily open to the spread of rumors and lies that can heighten crisis, I still believe the use of social media is effective. Kumar and Sagar showed their commitment to spreading accurate information for help amidst the confusion, and I believe that social media was one of the best tools for providing some clarity to the situation.

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[1] "Online Crisis Management: A Web of Support | The Economist." The Economist. The Economist, 14 July 2011. Web. 16 July 2011. <http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/07/online-crisis-management?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/awebofsupport>.

[2] “Online Crisis Management: A Web of Support”

[3] “Online Crisis Management: A Web of Support”

[4] "Mumbai Blasts - Wednesday 13 July 2011 | World News | Guardian.co.uk." The Guardian. 13 July 2011. Web. 17 July 2011. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/jul/13/mumbai-blasts>.