CHAPEL HILL, NC (Oct. 15, 2010) – Research on social media response to the Haiti earthquake is charting a new future for organizing housing resources after a natural disaster.
A project conducted by students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and housing analysts at Socialserve.com, a national non-profit affordable housing agency, studied the way social media addressed donations of resources, situation assessment and finding people affected by the January 12 Haiti earthquake.
Three students in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication investigated the use of social media tools between January 13 and April 30. Their research revealed that social media addressed more than half of the 17 lessons learned by the United States government in its response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Most social media tools used in response to the Haiti earthquake did not exist at the time of Hurricane Katrina.
The students – Faye Fang of Apex, N.C., and Jeff Miles of Cary, N.C., along with Lindsay Britt of Washington, D.C., who graduated in May – shared their research in a website, www.arcHmediaproject.org. They named the website for Haiti, housing, hope and the Tar Heels nickname.
“Haiti marked a historic shift in the use of social media for disaster intervention,” said Van Gottel, chief executive officer of Socialserve.com. “Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Ushahidi have tremendous potential for solving problems after disasters. These new tools were used on-the-fly after Haiti, and we’re working now with social workers and government agencies to deploy them efficiently in future disasters in the United States and Canada.”
Socialserve.com powers TNHousingSearch.org, a disaster housing resource funded by the Tennessee Housing Development Agency.
“Socialserve.com is already applying many of the lessons identified by the UNC student team,” Gottel said. “After flooding in May, Tennessee emergency management officials aggressively deployed social media tools to organize resources after a disaster. We used Twitter and Facebook to repeatedly direct people to the Tennessee Emergency Management Association’s Facebook page and website, and to the site of the Federal Emergency Management Authority.”
Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube and crowdsourcing applications solve specific issues in disaster intervention, according to the students’ research. Facebook presents a remarkable ability to organize volunteers after a disaster. However, it also requires careful planning by social worker intermediaries to ensure security for both volunteers and disaster evacuees. Twitter provides rapid and valuable information to emergency responders in the first 72 hours after a disaster event. Tweets filed in the initial hours of a disaster exceed 300 per minute, providing near real-time data for situation assessment. In addition, Twitter enables social workers, emergency responders and agency officials to network before a disaster and to organize themselves quickly. New mobile phone technologies widely deployed after the Haiti earthquake have fundamentally changed fundraising after disasters. Beyond monetary donations, mobile phone technologies have the potential to transform many other aspects of disaster planning, including locating victims and coordinating volunteer resources.
The student research program is one of many pro bono projects supported annually by the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The students were advised by Napoleon Byars, assistant professor, and Bob Page, a Chapel Hill-based communication consultant.
Socialserve.com, based in Charlotte, provides affordable housing services in 29 states and has extensive experience in disaster housing relocation services, serving during the Southern California wildfires in 2007 and during floods, tornadoes, and storms across the Midwest and Southeast. In the six weeks after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the agency rapidly established emergency services and provided more than 151,000 referrals for housing and related resources. More information is available at www.socialserve.com/archmediaproject.
Contact:
Napoleon Byars, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 919-843-7274, napoleon.byars1@gmail.com
Bob Page, PageStrategy Communications, 919-360-0433, bob@pagestrategy.com
Beth Leysieffer, Socialserve.com, 980-355-1665, beth@socialserve.com
