Social media and disaster management: US FEMA as a benchmark for its European counterparts?

Over the last two decades disaster management and its public communication have been substantially transformed by the development of digital media such as blogs, wikis, social media and Youtube. Taken together, these shifts raise a series of issues for work in disaster management. Managing emergencies is a complex undertaking that relies extensively on knowledge management systems. Unlike European counterparts such as the German Bundesdienst für Bevolkerungsschutz und Katastrophenhilfe (BBK, Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance) and the Italian Protezione Civile (Civil Protection), the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) employs social media technologies such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter as relevant disaster management and knowledge sharing mechanisms. This paper investigates how FEMA uses Facebook and Twitter, what knowledge is shared through these social media, and how knowledge sharing is facilitated and expedited through the use of these systems. Linguistic analysis is conducted to investigate the use of terminology, attitudinal and affective words, syntactical structures, markers of shared and unshared information, thematic structure and text complexity. Similar items in Facebook and Twitter in English are compared, and English tweets are then contrasted with those in the Spanish version of FEMA. Findings are discussed in terms of the methodological problem of what knowledge to transmit in emergencies and how to provide alerts that do not spread panic or descriptions that form accountable reports of disaster management with a view to offering strategies for future deployment of social media in Europe and elsewhere.