New study offers improved strategy for social media communications during wildfires
In the last 20 years, disasters have claimed more than a million lives and caused nearly $3 trillion in economic losses worldwide, according to the United Nations.
Disaster relief organizations (DROs) mobilize critical resources to help impacted communities, and they use social media to distribute information rapidly and broadly. Many DROs post content via multiple accounts within a single platform to represent both national and local levels.
Specifically examining wildfires in collaboration with the Canadian Red Cross (CRC), new research from the University of Notre Dame contradicts existing crisis communication theory that recommends DROs speak with one voice during the entirety of wildfire response operations.
“Speak with One Voice? Examining Content Coordination and Social Media Engagement During Disasters” is forthcoming in Information Systems Research from Alfonso Pedraza-Martinez, the Greg and Patty Fox Collegiate Professor of IT, Analytics and Operations at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.
Social media informs victims about wildfires, but it also connects volunteers, donors and other supporters. Accounts can send coordinated messages targeting the same audience (match) or different audiences (mismatch).
According to crisis communication theory, a disaster relief organization’s communication channels should speak with one voice through multiple accounts targeting the same audience, but the team’s study recommends a more nuanced approach.
“We find the national and local levels should match audiences during the early wildfire response when uncertainty is very high, but they should mismatch audiences during recovery while the situation is still critical but uncertainty has decreased,” said Pedraza-Martinez, who specializes in humanitarian operations and disaster management. “We find that user engagement increases when the national headquarters lead the production of content and the local accounts follow either by tweeting to a matching or mismatching audience, depending on timing in the operation.”
The study reveals that engagement improves by 4.3 percent from a match only during the uncertain and urgent response phase, while a divergence of content creation decisions, or mismatch, yields 29.6 percent more engagement when uncertainty subsides during the recovery phase. More