Did Web 2.0 really help people during Hurricane Gustav?
Saturday, September 6th, 2008Every Dot Connects, Podcasting News, and Mashable highlighted examples of Web 2.0 services being used to prepare for Hurricane Gustav, mainly Twitter. But what is the net effect of our digital conversations and connections in an emergency like this? How can we show that people changed their behavior, hopefully to make better decisions, because of social media?
One surface indicator is simply how many people interacted with these services. This could be an engagement score that aggregates metrics such as comments, page views, etc. from a number of websites. The basic conclusion here is that x amount of people from y places in the world used social media in z ways during the emergency period. For example, trending from Twitter shows that the word Gustav peaked at over 2,000 tweets on September 1st. Similarly, there is a Google search volume of 100 for Gustav especially in states like Louisiana. The interesting insight from this data is how many people outside the emergency areas engaged in social media to help others out.
Another method that gets us closer to the tangible impact of social media is collecting transactional data from both brick and click sources. For example, how many people found a shelter because of an online group like ShelterFinder? The problem is that transactional data is heavily guarded in silos and we have yet to achieve data portability between the government and social media platforms. However, basic e-commerce stats should help us track the dollar from applications like Causes which has raised $1167 among various Hurricane Gustav relief efforts. Micropayments offer clear hope but the key is showing people that a convenient $5 really made a difference in someone’s life.
Future directions of Web 2.0 during emergencies :
1.Mobile
More work in the mobile space is needed because chances are people will not have online access in a disaster. SMS offers a potentially robust platform that we discussed at our Texting 4 Health conference.
2. Data Portability
Imagine every time there is an emergency, websites “turn-on” an application that works across platforms to collect valuable insights about social media impact.
3. ?
Share your thoughts on what the future Web 2.0 applications should do!
