Can Official Disaster Response Apps Compete with Twitter?
There are over half-a-billion Twitter users, with an average of 135,000 new users signing up on a daily basis (1). Can emergency management and disaster response organizations win over some Twitter users by convincing them to use their apps in addition to Twitter? For example, will FEMA’s smartphone app gain as much “market share”? The app’s new crowdsourcing feature, “Disaster Reporter,” allows users to submit geo-tagged disaster-related images, which are then added to a public crisis map. So the question is, will more images be captured via FEMA’s app or from Twitter users posting Instagram pictures?
This question is perhaps poorly stated. While FEMA may not get millions of users to share disaster-related pictures via their app, it is absolutely critical for disaster response organizations to explicitly solicit crisis information from the crowd. See my blog post “Social Media for Emergency Management: Question of Supply and Demand” for more information on the importance demand-driven crowdsourcing. The advantage of soliciting crisis information from a smartphone app is that the sourced information is structured and thus easily machine readable. For example, the pictures taken with FEMA’s app are automatically geo-tagged, which means they can be automatically mapped if need be.
While many, many more picture may be posted on Twitter, these may be more difficult to map. The vast majority of tweets are not geo-tagged, which means more sophisticated computational solutions are necessary. Instagram pictures are geo-tagged, but this information is not publicly available. So smartphone apps are a good way to overcome these challenges. But we shouldn’t overlook the value of pictures shared on Twitter. Many can be geo-tagged, as demonstrated by the Digital Humanitarian Network’s efforts in response to Typhoon Pablo. More-over, about 40% of pictures shared on Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma Tornado had geographic data. In other words, while the FEMA app may have 10,000 users who submit a picture during a disaster, Twitter may have 100,000 users posting pictures. And while only 40% of the latter pictures may be geo-tagged, this would still mean 40,000 pictures compared to FEMA’s 10,000. Recall that over half-a-million Instagram pictures were posted during Hurricane Sandy alone.
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