Conclusions

Due to the integration of social media into the public's daily life, social media will continue to grow in popularity as an information source for the public during disasters. The Communication Hub Framework aims to improve local emergency managers and their agency/department's use of social media to disseminate critical information during a disaster. The framework uniquely incorporates stakeholder organizations as a method of amplifying the reach of critical social media messaging. In addition to the benefits of amplifying the reach of disaster-related messaging, the framework supports the whole community concept and the idea of disaster management starting and ending locally. The proposed conceptual framework fosters positive collaboration between local EM professionals and their stakeholders, while simultaneously working towards disaster risk reduction by establishing a social media communication plan with participating stakeholders prior to the onset of a disaster. Despite the benefits of the framework, there are limitations to the use of the framework as the reliance of power and cell-phone service, dependence on stakeholder engagement and willingness to participate, and the conceptual limitations of the framework. This study is limited by the conceptual constraints of the framework and the lack of research on this framework in practice. The validity of the framework would benefit from future research analyzing the use of the Communication Hub Framework in a real-world exercise or event. However, given that disasters are becoming more frequent by the day it is crucial that local emergency managers have access to critical knowledge, such as the Communication Hub Framework, to provide guidance on how to effectively incorporate stakeholders into the disaster preparedness and response processes. The conceptual Communication Hub Framework effectively provides local emergency managers with a method of utilizing stakeholder partnerships to increase the reach of the critical disaster message on social media as a complementing communication tool to their traditional modes of communication. Although the uses of social media have increased the public's expectation for quick access to disaster-related information, the Communication Hub Framework can help local EM professionals close the gap between the public's expectations and their department's capability to meet the rising expectations.