Contents Introduction


Social media: A brief history Who uses social media?


How social media shapes discourse 1. Westminster Attack


2. United Airlines incident 3. MH370


Conclusion


2 3 4 5 5 6 7 8


Introduction


In our previous paper, Emergency Communication Systems: Key events and drivers of growth over the past 15 years (2016) we discussed how the concepts of the Emergency Communication System/Mass Notification System (MNS) had evolved over the past 15 years in response to a number of hand-picked major incident case studies – including extreme weather events and terror incidents.


As was shown in the above paper, the marketplace for MNS soſtware has grown significantly – especially in the public sector in the United States – for very obvious reasons. This has led to increasingly complex and sophisticated systems with a wide range of possible integrations that have perhaps outgrown, for better or worse, the basic principle of a system designed to keep businesses running smoothly and keeping people safe.


In contrast to the more mechanical evaluation of MNS soſtware in the prior EMS paper, in this paper we will discuss how the growth of social media and the internet has radically reshaped the nature of how organizations communicate with relevant stakeholders (customers, the general public, citizens etc.) during a crisis.


Alongside this it is worth examining how exactly these changes affect the ability of businesses, organizations and governments to craſt a coherent message that people listen to and what organizations such as these can do to avoid some of the more common pitfalls of communicating effectively and meaningfully in the event of a crisis.


Page 2 | Crisis Comms & Social Media


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