PRDV107: Crisis Communication

As the use of social media as a crisis communication tool has increased, frameworks and guidelines have been developed to guide the use of social media in crisis and disaster-related communications. The Social Media Emergency Management (SMEM) Guidance Tool, the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communications (CERC) framework, and a conceptual bidirectional framework were analyzed and used as inspiration for the proposed Communication Hub framework.

Social Media Emergency Management (SMEM) Guidance Tool

The Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) collaborated with FEMA and several public safety and EM professionals to jointly produce the SMEM Guidance Tool. In August of 2020, the SMEM Guidance Tool was publicly released as an online, beta web application intended to provide "first responders, emergency managers, and public information officers" guidance on how to improve their organization's planning and actual use of social media in emergency operations. At all levels of government, EM officials can access the online tool free of charge. The SMEM Guidance Tool was created to address the gap between the public's expectation for government agencies to use social media platforms and governmental agencies' "delivery capabilities".

The SMEM Guidance Tool web application includes the three following customizable resources: "Building a Social Media Business Case", "Developing a Social Media Plan", and "Building a Digital Volunteer Program". The "Building a Social Media Business Case" template aids PIOs, and EM professionals build a business proposal to create and implement a SMEM program. Throughout the template, the users are led to consider their agencies' established policies; state and local laws regarding social media use; and the resources required to carry out the SMEM plan. Once users obtain approval for social media use by their agency, the "Developing Social Media Plan" template will aid them in creating a plan for managing social media accounts. The template requires users to consider the organization's social media team's roles, determine the objectives of using the selected social media platforms, and create account management procedures. Using the "Building a Digital Volunteer Program" template, PIOs and EM professionals can plan to incorporate volunteers into their social media plan to help collect crowdsourced information and monitor social media interactions. The "Building a Digital Volunteer Program" template helps users create a standard operating procedure, establish a memorandum of understanding, and take steps to start a volunteer program. Overall, the SMEM Guidance Tool effectively provides three robust resources that emergency managers and PIOs can customize to fit their agencies' communication needs.

Although the SMEM tool aims to guide social media implementation into emergency operations, the tool fails to outline the process of dispersing information via social media during an ongoing disaster. The web application lacks details on how to craft social media messages, essential information to include in posts, and how to use partnerships with stakeholders to aid in message amplification. Additionally, the SMEM Guidance Tool fails to address differential outcomes the tool might have at each level of government due to the differing structures and access to resources across EM agencies at various levels of government. An EM agency's success with using and implementing the plans developed with the SMEM Guidance Tool has the potential to vary, based on the agency's level of government, organizational structure, and availability of resources. Despite the small gaps in the provided information, the SMEM Guidance Tool supplies emergency managers and PIOs with an easy-to-use platform to create a social media business case, a social media plan, and a digital volunteer program. Due to the functionality of the SMEM tool, aspects of the SMEM tool, such as the varying templates provided by the tool, are utilized in the

Crisis and Emergency Risk Communications (CERC) Framework

In 2002, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) created the CERC framework and accompanying manual to aid in an organization's communication of crisis-related information to the public during public health emergencies. The CERC framework uniquely merges risk and crisis communication concepts to use both types of communication to form effective messaging during a crisis via the implementation of the framework's six fundamental principles are in The Principles of the CERC Framework are as follows: "be first, be right, be credible, express empathy, promote action, and show respect". According to the CERC manual, crisis and emergency risk communication often occurs unexpectedly, and the communication messages are delivered by a spokesperson whom is also impacted by the crisis unfolding. The goal of this type of communication is disperse accurate information in a timely manner that will enable the public to make sound decisions. Throughout the "preparation, initial, maintenance, and recovery" phases of the disaster, the CERC framework calls for communicators to fulfill the framework's three objectives of community engagement, empower decision-making, and evaluation.

In the CERC manual, social media is highlighted as a tool to gather audience feedback, identify information gaps, engage with the community, and identify the spread of misinformation during a crisis. Within the CERC framework, social media posts are used to increase the public's self-efficacy, establish the public's trust in the responding agency, and collaborate with key stakeholders by reposting credible posts. Although the CDC's CERC framework aids communicators at all three levels of government, this framework is specifically intended for communicators in the field of public health. Elements of the framework, such as the six principles of CERC, are applicable to effective crisis communications in the field of emergency management; however, there is a need for a framework with qualities of the CERC framework specifically intended for use by EM professionals. The proposed Communication Hub Framework incorporates the CERC framework's focus on community engagement as well as the framework's emphasis on the use of social media messages for engaging in both one-way and two-way communication with the community. Despite the CERC framework and the Communication Hub framework having some similarities, they differ widely due to both frameworks being intended for use within specific disciplines, public health and emergency management respectively.

A Conceptual Framework for Developing Solutions That Organise Social Media Information for Emergency Response Teams

In the article, "A Conceptual Framework for Developing Solutions that Organise Social Media Information for Emergency Response Teams", the authors propose a conceptual framework for bidirectional social media interaction during a disaster between the public and key EM officials such as the PIO interaction team, command and control, and the operations team. An essential aspect to the framework is the involvement of a working group, called the PIO interaction team, that focuses on "monitoring, updating, responding and interacting with the public" via social media platforms. Within the paper, Freitas et al. utilized a hub-and-spoke wheel formation to visually demonstrate the flow of information to and from the PIO interaction team (the hub) to the operations team, command and control, and the public (the spokes) as seem in Figure 1. The authors' innovative use of the hub-and-spokes wheel formation promotes effective flow of communication from a central team (the PIO Interaction Team). Community stakeholders and traditional media are the only two spokes of the framework that participate solely in unidirectional communication from the PIO interaction team. The unidirectional flow of information to the community stakeholders limits the stakeholders' involvement in the dispersal of the EM agency's disaster-related information via social media. Although the framework created by Freitas et al. limits bidirectional communication with stakeholders, the framework's hub-and-spoke formation has the potential to be adapted to foster bidirectional social media interaction and streamline information dispersal during a disaster.

Figure 1. A hub-and-spoke model created and proposed by Freitas et al. in the article titled A Conceptual Framework for Developing Solutions that Organise Social Media Information for Emergency Response Teams. Public Information Officers (PIO).