In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

More precisely, Administrator R. David Paulison held a 45-minute q & a with the public yesterday using the microblogging tool, Twitter. 

Paulison took questions and offered answers (within Twitter’s limit of 140 characters or less) to all comers on the agency’s Twitter account, femainfocus.  A “tweet log” as well as an audio file and full transcript of the event are available on the FEMA web site.

FEMA chose to hold this public availability to highlight the value of social media in emergency management and disaster response. Tools, such as Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, have been increasingly used by emergency responders, citizens and the press to gather and disseminate information in disasters. In his last week in office, Paulison will be doing a number of interviews with the news media — this format offered a chance for the general public as well as emergency management professionals from around the nation to get their questions answered as well. 

• When I took over FEMA, I recognized this nation deserved a strong, vibrant organization
• The first thing I recognized was that we needed to bring in strong leadership
• I started by recruiting people who had years of experience dealing with disasters
• I also wanted to change the culture of the organization
• I wanted to change FEMA from a reactive organization to a proactive organization
• I also recognized that FEMA couldn’t do it all by itself
That change also involved the entire emergency management community around this country
• Some examples are law enforcement and private sector along with nonprofits
• And developing new forms of communication, which is why we are using Twitter

The follow-up questions from the Twitter community ranged all over the emergency management map. Mine focused on how to best educate citizens about social media in emergencies. (In all honesty, it took me awhile to get the question down to 140 characters; Twitter definitely forces one to be more concise.): 

JohnDSolomon -#FEMARDP How can FEMA raise public awareness of social media’s (eg. Twitter) value in disaster prep/resp and accelerate use of these tools?

[Paulison]
• The more we use it, the more the people become aware of its value. 
• There is a whole new generation coming up who are very familiar with this type of communication

Afterwards, Paulison said he was happy with the first-time experiment.

“It’s a neat tool. It really is. And I think that hopefully the next administrator will take a run with it,” adding a very important challenge for the future, ‘We’ve got to find a better way to get information to the public.”