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1
Fundamentals of Alerts,
Warnings, and Social Media
T
he Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act of 2006
called for the creation of a national all-hazards alerting system that
would use multiple technologies to better reach affected popula-
tions. Since its passage, there has been an increasing interest in exploring
the use of social media to provide alerts and warnings. Social media is a
loosely defined term that refers to a set of Internet-based tools that sup-
port social interaction through many-to-many communications. The term
encompasses a variety of technologies including weblogs, microbloging
and mashup tools, and online social networks, examples of which include
Twitter, Google Maps, Facebook, and Flickr. It also includes tools like
Ushahidi that were purpose-built for use in crises. Social media are being
used in all sectors of society to support communication, collaboration,
and information collection and dissemination. Social media have proven
useful in a crisis both to officials seeking to deliver alerts, warnings, and
other information to the public and to citizens communicating with offi-
cials and each other.
This report presents a summary of a February 2012 workshop orga-
nized by the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Committee on Public
Response to Alerts and Warnings on Using Social Media: Current Knowl-
edge and Research Gaps. The first session of the workshop provided
an overview of alerts (an alert indicates that something significant has
happened or may happen), warnings (a warning typically follows an
alert and provides more detailed information indicating what protective
1
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2 PUBLIC RESPONSE TO ALERTS AND WARNINGS USING SOCIAL MEDIA
action should be taken),1 the use of social media for delivering alerts and
warnings, and other applications of social media in disaster manage-
ment. Dennis Mileti, University of Colorado, Boulder, described what is
known about how the public responds to alerts and warnings. Kristiana
Almeida, American Red Cross (ARC), described how the ARC uses social
media during disasters and provided results of ARC research on social
media use. Edward Hopkins, Maryland Emergency Management Agency,
discussed barriers to the use of social media by emergency managers.
Emre Gunduzhan, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory,
described current and emerging technologies for disseminating alerts and
warnings and enhancing situational awareness using social media.
CURRENT KNOWLEDGE ABOUT PUBLIC
RESPONSE TO ALERTS AND WARNINGS
More than 60 years of interdisciplinary research on disaster response
has yielded many insights about how people respond to information indi-
cating that they are at risk and under what circumstances they are most
likely to take appropriate protective action. Much of this knowledge has
been captured in the “Annotated Bibliography for Public Risk Communi-
cation on Warnings for Public Protective Action Response and Public Edu-
cation” that lists more than 350 publications.2 This body of research covers
natural disasters such as Hurricane Camille and the Mount St. Helens
eruption; terrorist attacks such as those on the World Trade Center in 1993
and 2001; hazardous material spills such as those that occurred during
the 1979 Mississauga, Ontario, train derailment and the 1987 Nanticoke,
Pennsylvania, factory fire; building fires such as those at the MGM Grand
Hotel in Las Vegas in 1980 and at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital; and
technological accidents such as the 1979 incident at the Three Mile Island
nuclear power station in Pennsylvania. Mileti outlined some of the key
results from research on how the public responds to alerts and warnings:
1 The difference between alerts and warnings can be unclear because a warning can also
serve as an alert, and an alert may be accompanied by some information about protective
measures. Technology has further eroded the distinction. For example, on mobile devices,
the Commercial Mobile Alert service will simultaneously deliver both a distinctive tone (the
alert) and a brief message with additional information (a warning). Similarly, sirens have
evolved to provide both a siren sound and a spoken message.
2 The extensive “Annotated Bibliography for Public Risk Communication on Warnings for
Public Protective Actions Response and Public Education” was compiled by Dennis Mileti,
Rachel Bandy, Linda B. Bourque, Aaron Johnson, Megumi Kano, Lori Peck, Jeannette Sutton,
and Michele Wood and is available at www.colorado.edu/hazards/publications/informer/
infrmr2/pubhazbibann.pdf.
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FUNDAMENTALS OF ALERTS, WARNINGS, AND SOCIAL MEDIA 3
• Research using hypothetical scenarios does not faithfully represent public
response. Studies on how people would respond to hypothetical events
do not generally predict how the public is likely to behave in response to
an actual alert or warning—or during a real event. By contrast, although
they may be harder or more expensive to conduct, studies of actual events
yield much better insights about the situational determinants of behavior
during emergencies.
• Education about the warning system is needed before an event. Public
education on warning systems is an important complement to educa-
tion about how to prepare for disasters. For example, it is important that
people know that a certain television or cell phone tone designates an
alert or warning, and where additional sources of authoritative informa-
tion can be found. Furthermore, it is important to remember that the
majority of people cannot remember what a given siren means, what a
color code may represent, or even the difference between the watches and
warnings issued by the National Weather Service. Comprehensive educa-
tion programs teach the public that a hazard exists, inform them about
the alerting/warning systems in place in their communities, and outline
what protective actions they might be asked to take. Essentially, these
programs prime the public by removing surprises and reducing confusion
in a future warning event.
• Alerting needs to attract attention. A primary goal of alerting is to
attract the affected population’s attention so that one can then provide
information. The most effective alerts are incredibly intrusive, able to be
noticed amidst the cacophony of daily life, and, for those who are asleep,
literally loud enough to wake them. The more channels, or mechanisms
used to disseminate alerts and warnings, the greater the chance an indi-
vidual will receive a message. Warnings should also be repeated; repeti-
tion commands attention, fosters confirmation, and prompts protective
action.
• People seek social confirmation of warnings before taking protective
action. Before acting in response to a warning, people generally seek
confirmation from others. The resulting process is known as milling,
in which individuals interact with others to confirm information and
develop a view about the risks they face at that moment and their possible
responses. Milling creates a lag between the time a warning is received
and the time protective action is taken. Yet few approaches to formulating
and delivering warnings focus on shortening this milling time. Indeed,
one important lesson from past research is that without careful attention
to the process of milling, the introduction of new warning systems may
increase rather than decrease individuals’ delay in response. Social media
provide a new way for these interactions among individuals to occur.
Although many first responders believe that social media have given
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4 PUBLIC RESPONSE TO ALERTS AND WARNINGS USING SOCIAL MEDIA
them less control over the warning process, informal dissemination of
messages has always played an important role in the warning process.
Indeed, one might conjecture that the inherently social nature of social
media might help reduce milling time, but whether this is true and under
what conditions is an open research question.
• Messages should contain information that is important to the population.
The key content of messages is what (the protective actions that should be
taken); when (by what time the protective actions should be taken); where
(the geographic area that will be affected); why (the risks and how protec-
tive action would reduce their impact); and who (the individuals or enti-
ties providing the information). In addition to content, message style also
matters. Messages need to be clear, simply worded; specific (i.e., precise
and non-ambiguous); accurate (i.e., free from errors that can create con-
fusion); certain (i.e., authoritative and confident); and consistent. When
changes in instructions are required, the reasons should be explained.
• Responders should consider the demographics of affected populations
when preparing warning messages. Status differences (e.g., gender, sex, age,
ethnicity, socioeconomics, and family relationships), an individual’s or a
community’s past experiences, and other environmental and social factors
all can affect how a warning will be interpreted.
• Access for those with disabilities must be considered when developing
alert or warning systems. Individuals with impaired hearing or impaired
vision or those with limited abilities may face challenges in receiving
particular alerts or warnings. Furthermore, individuals with disabilities
may encounter unique challenges in taking protective action or there may
be important unique factors in how they may interpret a warning.
• Alerting and warning is a process, not a single act. The communications
process includes issuing a warning, monitoring the public’s response to
the warning, listening for incorrect information the public may be receiv-
ing, and rewarning based on observations of what the public is doing or
not doing. Given the mix of official and unofficial information available
to the public, it is almost inevitable that people will be exposed to some
incorrect information, which can lead to inconsistencies that can delay
protective actions. Such misinformation and misinterpretation need to be
addressed in subsequent warnings.
SOCIAL MEDIA USE BY THE PUBLIC DURING DISASTERS
With a growing fraction of the public using social media, there has
been increasing interest in their use during disasters. One source of infor-
mation on how social media are used, presented by Kristiana Almeida,
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FUNDAMENTALS OF ALERTS, WARNINGS, AND SOCIAL MEDIA 5
comes from a 2011 American Red Cross study3 in which approximately
2,000 people were interviewed. Nearly 50 percent of those interviewed
reported that they visited one or more social media sites almost every day.
For those in metropolitan areas, this percentage was higher. Although one
in six subjects reported that they had used social media to find informa-
tion about an emergency, television continues to be their primary source
of information during these events. However, in cases where people did
not have access to a television, Facebook became their primary informa-
tion source. Furthermore, more than 80 percent of those interviewed
indicated that they were willing to post information about a disaster on
social media sites, including images or video clips.
More than a third of the regular social media users interviewed in
the Red Cross study indicated that they would request help via social
sites, and of those who would post requests for help, 80 percent expected
a response within an hour. However, only 15 percent believed that emer-
gency management agencies were actively following social media during
emergencies. That is, although many believed that emergency officials
should be following their feeds, few believed that they actually were.
Several key lessons could be taken from the 2011 Red Cross study,
observed Almeida. First, it suggests that there are opportunities for emer-
gency managers to use social media “crowdsourcing”4 to supplement
their situational awareness during emergencies. Second, because (accord-
ing to the Red Cross study) public officials are not currently prepared to
respond to requests for assistance via social media despite growing public
expectations for such a capability, officials will need to continue to remind
the public to use 911 to call for assistance.
BARRIERS TO INCORPORATING SOCIAL MEDIA
INTO EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
Although some emergency management organizations have begun
using social media to interact with the public, several barriers and chal-
lenges remain to more widespread adoption, including limited under-
standing of social media, concerns about loss of control, and institutional
limitations. Drawing on lessons he learned from discussions with fellow
local emergency managers, Edward Hopkins, Maryland State Emergency
Management Agency, noted the follow challenges:
3 American Red Cross. Social Media in Disasters and Emergencies. 2011. Available at
http://www.redcross.org/www-files/Documents/pdf/SocialMediainDisasters.pdf.
4 Crowdsourcing refers to the use of information provided by multiple, and often many,
individuals, who may have volunteered this information or been paid or given some other
incentive to provide it. Chapter 3 explores the use of crowdsourcing to win a competition.
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6 PUBLIC RESPONSE TO ALERTS AND WARNINGS USING SOCIAL MEDIA
• Limited understanding. Despite growing appreciation of the role that
social media can play in disasters, many emergency managers remain
more comfortable with traditional media, and not all are aware of the
potential advantages of social media as a tool for alerts and warnings.
Some of this is surely a result of generational or cultural differences.
Familiarity and comfort with social media for emergency management
can be expected to grow as training opportunities are provided and newly
hired employees bring with them a greater familiarity with social media.
(The adoption of social media by practitioners is discussed further in
Chapter 2.)
• Loss of control. When they use social media, emergency officials
cannot control which information social media users share, which raises
concerns that they might lose control of messaging or face civil liabilities
if misinformation is shared. By contrast, in the traditional command-post
style of information dissemination, long-standing relationships between
the press and emergency managers provide some sense of control over
what information is disseminated as well as well-understood opportuni-
ties to disseminate corrections as needed. It is the belief of some officials
that with social media, misinformation may spread more rapidly and
continue to spread even after a correction is issued.
• Institutional limitations. Especially in an era of shrinking budgets,
it is hard to find the resources to evaluate and adopt new tools and tech-
nologies, or to invest in the training necessary for their use. Also difficult
is securing new resources to cover the additional staff time necessary to
monitor social media activity. As a result, although emergency manage-
ment personnel may try to experiment with social media use, they may
find that their other (day-to-day and emergency) responsibilities crowd
out the possibility for this work. Also, such experimentation with social
media often precedes the creation of guidelines or formal policies for
their use, which can lead to unforeseen complications or questions being
raised by managers, and implementation of measures that restrict the use
of social media.
TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT FOR THE USE OF
SOCIAL MEDIA IN EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
Emre Gunduzhan discussed technologies that are needed to dissemi-
nate public alerts and warnings using social media and to develop situ-
ational awareness during disasters using information gleaned from social
media. Although some of these tools may be available now, they might
not have been used in emergency management practices. Additional tools
will also have to be developed that focus on the specific needs of disaster
response, commented Gunduzhan, who also outlined the following set of
technical challenges common across multiple alerting systems:
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FUNDAMENTALS OF ALERTS, WARNINGS, AND SOCIAL MEDIA 7
• Standard message formats. The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) is a
recently adopted protocol being used across multiple alerting platforms. 5
The advantage of CAP is that as an XML-based standard, it is machine-
readable, and Web services and applications can receive and process these
alerts. More recently, an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working
group, Authority-to-Citizen Alerts, has been developing a new protocol
for transmitting alerts to the public over the Internet.
• Capabilities for authorizing users. Some sort of scheme, which might
be a centralized, federated, or distributed identity management system,
is needed to help ensure that only those properly authorized to do so can
issue official messages.
• Digital signatures that indicate who sent a message. Public response is
affected by who sends a message. The public needs to be able to verify
who has sent a message and that the message is authentic. Nonrepudia-
tion supports the assignment of responsibility for the issuance of an alert
and protects from potential liability parties who relay an official message
in good faith.
• Geotargeting of alerts and warnings. Controlling the granularity of
alerting by geographically limiting the area targeted for receiving an alert
might greatly protect the public from alert overload and better ensure that
information gets to those who need to take a particular protective action
(e.g., shelter in place versus evacuate). With respect to this capability,
social media services diverge prominently from other alerting systems.
In other existing communication channels, physical parameters, such as
the area served by a set of cell towers or the metropolitan area served by
a radio or television broadcast tower, constrain the distribution of alerts
to a specific geographical area. By contrast, social media services embody
limited and imperfect knowledge of the precise location of their users.
Most often the information available is the address or town that may
have been provided as part of a user’s profile; a user’s Internet Protocol
address may also provide clues about his or her location. Although users
accessing social media services via mobile devices may be able to provide
accurate geotargeting information, users generally need to enable this
feature, and many choose not to do so owing to privacy concerns.
There are two possible methods for using social media to deliver
alerts and warnings. One is for the entity issuing the messages to simply
be registered as a user of the service, as would any other information
provider. The other is for the entity to establish a special relationship with
5 OASIS. Common Alerting Protocol, v. 1.1. OASIS Standard CAP-V1.1, October 2005.
Editors: Elysa Jones and Art Botterell. Available at http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/
org/workgroup/emergency/download.php/14205/emergency- CAPv1.1-Committee%20
Specification.pdf.
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8 PUBLIC RESPONSE TO ALERTS AND WARNINGS USING SOCIAL MEDIA
the social media service. The characteristics of each method are outlined
in Box 1.1.
Today, emergency managers are making use of only the first alterna-
tive, noted Gunduzhan. For example, a local jurisdiction may set up a
Twitter account and simply post warnings as an update that would be
seen by those who follow that account or find the post as the result of
a search. Similar possibilities exist with other social media services like
Facebook and Google+, although who sees what messages and under
what conditions is more complicated owing to the service design. Such
arrangements have the advantage of being possible to implement today
without reaching agreement on a new interface to deliver alerts and warn-
ings or new arrangements for their display to users at risk from an event.
On the other hand, they require that emergency managers find a set of
clients that allow them to post messages to each service, and no special
provisions are available to ensure that affected populations see the right
set of alerts and warnings. (There is also a question of how to establish
the authenticity of alerts and warnings; see above.)
Alternatively, emergency managers might establish partnerships with
social media services for disseminating alerts and warnings, either on
behalf of individual agencies or collectively at the state or federal level.
BOX 1.1
Characteristics of Alternative Methods for
Distribution of Social Media Alerts
Distribution by a Registered User of Distribution Via Collaboration with
Social Media Services Social Media Sites
• Alerts appear as ordinary • Alerts can be given priority and
messages. special treatment.
• Alerts are difficult to scale and • A single standard interface
maintain due to many different definition can be used by all
application programming interfaces collaborating social media sites.
(APIs) that are subject to change at • Citizens will automatically be
any time. included in the service but may be
• Citizens have to register for the allowed to opt out.
service (opt in). • The social media site
• Alert authentication and implements additional alert
authorization are managed authentication and authorization.
externally to the social media site. • Non-repudiation and liability
• Non-repudiation is not a major protection need to be addressed.
issue.
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FUNDAMENTALS OF ALERTS, WARNINGS, AND SOCIAL MEDIA 9
For example, social media providers could agree with emergency man-
agers to take steps in concert to make alerts more obvious to users. Such
an approach is analogous to the Commercial Mobile Alert Service, in
which cellular carriers have been working with the federal government
to establish a standard message format, alert tone, and national gateway
for delivering messages.
TECHNOLOGIES FOR DEVELOPING SITUATIONAL
AWARENESS FROM SOCIAL MEDIA
Several workshop participants observed that unlike other means of
delivering alerts and warnings, social media technologies offer the dis-
tinct advantage that they are two-way, are interactive, and provide an
opportunity to see how the public is responding to the message. That
same interactivity poses new challenges, however, such as managing
the sheer volume of messages that can be sent during a major event. For
example, following the announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death, mes-
sages (“tweets”) were being posted to Twitter at a rate of about 3,000 per
second.
Given the flood of information available from social media, some
workshop participants observed that automated filtering tools are likely
to be key to developing situational awareness. For example, automation
can help categorize sources and separate relevant and irrelevant infor-
mation. Progress toward such automated tools will rely on advances in
natural-language processing. The location of a source of information is
also helpful in separating out relevant information and can sometimes
be determined from a user’s profile or from metadata associated with
the message, or inferred from the content of the message itself. Several
workshop participants noted that even with greater automation, human
judgment will be needed to interpret and act on the selected messages. 6
Visualization tools that can help emergency managers make sense of
social media information are already available to some extent, observed
workshop participants. Ushahidi, an open source tool for information
collection, visualization, and interactive mapping,7 for example, has been
used successfully during a number of disasters.8 Looking ahead, one
6 In an effort to combine technological tools and human judgment to monitor social media,
the American Red Cross opened its Digital Operations Center in March 2012.
7 See http://www.ushahidi.com/.
8 The value of Ushahidi during the 2010 earthquake in Haiti is explored in Nathan
Morrow, N. Mock, A. Papendieck, and N. Kocmich, Independent Evaluation of the Ushahidi
Haiti Project, Development Information Systems International, 2011, available at http://
www.alnap.org/pool/files/1282.pdf. The report explains, “Perhaps the most common use
of information aggregated by UHP was for situational awareness. The Department of State
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10 PUBLIC RESPONSE TO ALERTS AND WARNINGS USING SOCIAL MEDIA
challenge is how to integrate information from multiple social media
services as well as from other information sources. Gunduzhan noted
that addressing this challenge will require attention to a mix of standard
interfaces and formats as well as translators.
The use of tools to gather and analyze information derived from
social media services raises a set of privacy issues associated with the col-
lection, processing, retention, and distribution of such information. These
issues were explored in another workshop panel, whose observations are
presented in Chapter 5.
OBSERVATIONS OF WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS
During the discussion, panelists and other workshop participants
offered a number of observations on the use of social media for alerts and
warnings, including the following:
• Although the public response to alerts and warnings has been
studied for some time, as have more general questions about the informa-
tion needs of the public during disasters, there has been comparatively
little research on the use of newer technologies such as mobile devices
(e.g., cell and smart phones) or social media during disasters. Research
would help shed light on such key questions as how the new technologies
could help shorten the milling time between receipt of an alert or warning
and the taking of protective action.
• Questions still remain regarding the extent to which social media
represent a truly new source of information for improving the situational
awareness of emergency managers or whether much or most of the infor-
mation simply repeats information already available from other, tradi-
tional sources.
• The particular characteristics of social media platforms yield dif-
ferent “affordances” of use during disaster situations. For example, social
networks on Facebook are usually user-defined: messages to one’s net-
work might help target localized attention and allow extended discus-
sion. Facebook newsgroups, however, are public and can draw collected
attention. Twitter supports rapid communications that are most often
public. The communications are short and can easily be “retweeted” or
analysts for the USG interagency task force used Ushahidi in at least one case to help
triangulate conclusions about the situation on the ground, and US military organizations
used Ushahidi data feeds along with other sources in a similar manner to inform their
early situational assessments. There is also some evidence of the information being used
for specific operational and tactical actions targeting specific communities (and to a much
lesser extent, individuals). US marines used the information to identify ‘centers of gravity’
for deployment of field teams to [affected] areas.”
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FUNDAMENTALS OF ALERTS, WARNINGS, AND SOCIAL MEDIA 11
propagated publicly. Those that are propagated have a chance of receiving
attention; those that are not die out quickly.
• It is important not to think of these platforms as better or worse;
rather, it is critical to understand that they are different places along some-
times circuitous paths to seeking and finding information.
