Wendy Harmon, the American Red Cross’ (ARC) social media guru, is spearheading an open conversation today billed as the Emergency Social Data Summit.
ARC describes the goal of the summit this way:
The American Red Cross is hosting the Emergency Social Data Summit to bring together government agencies, emergency management professionals, disaster response organizations, tech companies and concerned citizens to address how to reply to these digital cries for help more effectively.
The framework for the summit lies within this document aptly titled, “The Case for Integrating Crisis Response with Social Media.” The urgency for this effort is born of survey results from the Red Cross that indicate that regular web users expect crisis response organizations like the Red Cross should be monitoring social media channels to respond to immediate needs. The Red Cross reported that, “The survey showed that 69 percent said that emergency responders should be monitoring social media sites in order to quickly send help—and nearly half believe a response agency is probably already responding to any urgent request they might see.”
There area host of ways to stay tuned to the summit, the hashtag is #crisisdata, the real-time blog is here.
This is a remarkable social response to a social problem. Yet one more reason that Wendy Harmon is named one of the 50 most powerful people in the nonprofit sector!
