E-Marketing – it's a perspective

Social media seems to be a self-learned method for disaster response. In the wake of the Japanese 8.9 earthquake that happened on March 11^th 2011, the power of social media cannot go unnoticed. Individuals and families within the areas of the

disaster are able to tweet about their safety and status, can ask for help and

Lee Jae-won / Reuters

resources, point to areas that were more seriously affected and more. However, the difference that social media makes over other traditional media is ease of access and

immediacy. Social media allows one to quickly communicate with the people they feel can help immediately, or take the necessary action to help; I underline feel because it may not be the most effective method available at the moment, but I also think it can be. Many people in Japan are already showing its effectiveness through tweets using Twitter.

There was an incident in 2009 where a couple of young girls were trapped in a stormwater drain and used Facebook to get help by updating their Facebook status.  A friend of theirs read the status and contacted help. (Read more…)

If the girls were able to use their mobile to update their Facebook, why not call for help instead?

That same question was raised by the Metropolital Fire Service, as well as Terry Flew, a professor of Media and Communications at the Queensland University of Technology. Flew explains that public education campaigns are facing an ongoing struggle to compete with social media.

There is no clear answer to the question, but I think that the struggle against social media should stop; it should be embraced as a method for to bring relief; as Flew states, “clearly it’s not good enough to say ‘well they should have rung emergency services’, the point is that they didn’t, and we need to think about why that’s the case and what strategies can be used in the future.”  A simple emergency relief tab on Facebook, Twitter, mySpace that is monitored by emergency sevices is a possibility, and even a community relief page are simple ideas that I think should be considered.

Further comments and ideas about this would be greatly valued.