Assignment: Social Media Exercise

The Goal of this exercise is to familiarize students with Social Media and potential uses in disasters by conducting a simple exercise. We will be simulating a disaster situation and using twitter to communicate critical information and gain intelligence.

Objectives are:

? Gain exposure to a popular Social Media site: Twitter
? Explore beneficial uses of Social Media in Disasters
? Test common and simple applications of Social Media for Emergency Management.

Instructions:

Set Up:

1. Each student must establish a twitter account. You are welcome to use an existing one or create one for this exercise.

a. Go to twitter or download the app.

b. Create profile. You are free to make you account anonymous. You are also free to delete the account anytime after the exercise is complete.

c. Ensure that location services are turned on.

d. Use Hashtag #EMAN620 for all posts

2. Follow my Twitter account which is @JachimowizAdam

3. Tweet "I am here #EMAN620 " or something similar

4. Search for #EMAN620 and follow your classmates.

All ready set up login combatthomas1 Password. AA##kk9239

Task 1 Accountability Exercise:

- Sometime after Wednesday evening I will be sending out a tweet that indicates a mock disaster has occurred. Any message I send that is part of the Exercise will be Marked **Exercise** message **Exercise** or something similar. Also monitor your email more frequently as I may send messages out that way too.

- When you receive this you are to report your status as 1) Ok or 2) Needing assistance or 3) Other. Remember to use the hashtag #EMAN620

- You must include a location as well. You can use a generalized location such as a neighborhood or city if you prefer.

Task 2: Message Dissemination:

- Assume you are impacted by the Orville Dam emergency. Meaning that you were one of the 200,000 people recently evacuated and still not home. Read up on the event here

- Using Twitter explore this event by searching for relevant hashtags. Your specific goal is to get the most official source or sources you can find.

Task 3:Analysis

- The objective of this task is to find, explore and use a free tweet analytics tool

o Here is a place you can start your search :

o This is a good one too that I have used in the past:

- Using the Orville dam or another disaster or event, play around with the tool or multiple ones.

Deliverables:

Each student must submit for parts 1, 2 & 3 in the assignments folder. Question 4 is to be posted in the main discussion area of the class.

Questions 1- Accountability: Provide a simple report on the accountability of all your fellow students. Include the location and time after the original tweet was sent. Is this a good way to do an accountability drill? There are 24 students in the class.

Questions 2- Message dissemination:

? What was the most official source of Information you discovered?
? What was your strategy to filter out the "noise" and how can you be confident in a source?

Questions 3- Analysis:

? What site did you use? What Hashtag did you use?

? Provide one statistic of piece information that you learned from the analysis and discuss how can this be used by an emergency manager who is responding to this event?

Question 4- General Discussion: What has this simple exercise taught you about the usefulness of Social Media in Disasters? What are the implications for using this on a mass scale such as a large city?

Question 5- Exercise Feedback

Provide any feedback to the Prof on this exercise. Was it useful? How can it be improved? This question is optional, but responses are appreciated .

Attachment:- Social-Media-Exercise.rar