UCI researchers help demystify key elements of digital disaster communications
UCI researchers help demystify key elements of digital disaster communications
- December 3, 2015
- Study suggests strategies emergency management agencies can use to promote reposting
Emotional appeal is among the factors increasing the chance that disaster communiques
posted on social media by emergency management agencies will be retransmitted by recipients,
researchers at the University of California, Irvine and the University of Kentucky
have found.
Messages describing hazard impacts and emphasizing cohesion among users generated
the most “retweets,” according to the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Public agencies have recently adopted social media platforms such as Twitter and
Facebook to impart vital information during emergency situations, augmenting their
use of radio and television. Reposting ensures the broad dissemination of this information
throughout the online community.
Other elements encouraging retransmission include the number of users in an agency’s
network and the inclusion of an agreed-upon hashtag. The research also showed that
posts expressing gratitude or containing URL links to additional information were
less widely shared by users during disasters.
“In an emergency, information comes to us from our friends, family and co-workers
as often as from official sources. These ties can be a powerful conduit for getting
the word out when disaster threatens, but leveraging them depends on knowing what
will get a message passed on,” said co-author Carter Butts, a UCI professor of sociology
affiliated with the California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology
on campus. “Our work is helping to reveal the differences between messages that people
pass on and those that they don’t.”
The researchers reviewed all tweets sent by emergency management and public safety
organizations during a terrorist attack, a wildfire, a blizzard, a hurricane and a
flash flood. They recorded the number of times each was retweeted and then analyzed
factors related to the probability the communiques would be retransmitted by recipients.
“The content and style of a message, the characteristics of the sender and the context
of the event all combine to make a message more or less likely to be widely disseminated,”
Butts said. “There’s no single factor that determines the outcome, but there are general
patterns that are predictive.”
He added: “Our findings support the intuition that critical information – like advisories
or hazard impacts – makes a message more likely to get passed on. But we also find
that strong emotional appeals can sometimes enhance the retransmission rate. Content
is important, but the most compelling content is not always the most pragmatic.”
Emergency management officials have sought input from Butts and his colleagues on
how best to utilize social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, which require
brevity.
“Shorter messages are not necessarily simpler to write,” said lead author Jeannette
Sutton, director of the University of Kentucky’s Risk & Disaster Communication Center.
“We have decades of research on longer warning messages and practically none on short
messages. The increased use of new media and short messaging channels makes it imperative
that studies be conducted to guide effective messaging strategies to reach those at
risk.”
Ongoing research at UCI and the University of Kentucky on disaster communications
in the digital age is funded by the National Science Foundation.
-Brian Bell, UCI Communications
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