From December 13-16, 2010, the Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) “Shared Strategies for Homeland Security,” kicked-off off in Denver Colorado. Focusing on current protection, prevention, response, and recovery strategies related to terrorism as well as emerging threats and implications for safety and security planning, conference attendees walked away with a new suite of best practices to improve the safety and security of our Nation.

This conference placed a prime on social media’s role in alerts and warnings. With compelling insight from speakers such as Dennis Mileti of the University of Colorado at Boulder and Heather Blanchard of CrisisCommons, attendees learned how they can leverage social media at a public alert and warning channel. Mileti detailed how social media is not a problem for public warnings—it is a solution.

Dr. Mileti believes social media can be used for the following purposes:

• Better monitor and assess public thoughts, actions and inactions during a public warning event
• To facilitate better ways to issue subsequent official public warning
• Create messages based on what people actually are and aren’t doing
• Help shorten the time it takes to alert the public
• Reach hard-to-reach sub-populations
• Facilitate people’s natural inclination to provide informal notifications to people they know
• Steer people to official and complete warning messages and information

Blanchard discussed how social media is not a novel concept, that it’s just a different way of connecting, using different tools to connect. She dispelled several myths about using social media to alert the public. Some of the notable myths are:

• Social media is a PIO responsibility
• It’s not verified information, so we can’t use it
• The big no- your not in public affairs (you’re not a spokesperson)
• You have to be “plugged-in” to benefit

Another session of interest was a panel on the Social Media Response to Recent Colorado Wildfire in September 2010.    The Colorado Department of Emergency Management developed and used a central website to disseminate information to blogs and other social media channels during the wildfires.  By planning ahead, the department was able to regularly disseminate information during the wildfires to keep interest peaked, whether or not the information was new or not.  One of the keys to the success of the Colorado Department of Emergency Management using social media during this emergency was its ability to freely leverage social media, primarily because they have an established social media policy at the agency.  This policy embraces social media as opposed to some other social media policies at government agencies which are written to limit or lock down the use of social media at an agency.

CO OEM tweeted during the emergency telling citizens to submit information to the government about the fires using 1 standard hashtag when multiple hashtags were informally being used.  This allowed CO OEM to be able to spend less time making sure they were capturing all relevant information that was being shared by citizens.  CO OEM also succeeds with its social media policy by making sure all EMs are trained in Social Media and use it daily in their personal lives.  By making the EMs “buy-in” to the tools ahead of time, they can ensure the EMs are comfortable using the tools when called upon during an emergency.

All in all, Denver UASI paved a path for further discussion on the importance of using social media as a public alert and warning channel.