Social media is here to stay! in crises, individuals turn to social media to both look for information and share thoughts, feelings and calls for help. Thus social media is a rich source of information relevant to crisis management. However, studies in crisis communication reveal that the adoption and implementation of social media encounters many barriers such as converting data into actionable information and management of resources dedicated to social media.
Social media in crisis communications has been studied for over 20 years. This article, presents an analysis of the state of the art of research in the area of social media use for crisis management by consolidating key findings that describe the main features of social media adoption in this area.
First, the article focused on the key features of social media adoption in crisis communications, characterized by improvisation and accelerated processes in the midst of a crisis response when the information is scarce. These accelerated processes usually are the result of tight organizational networks, flexible configurations, rapid flow of information for decision making, and online and offline actions.
Then the article identifies the cyclical nature of the social media function that oscillates from non-crisis to crisis state. Worth noting that the return from crisis state to non-crisis has not been thoroughly explored in the literature.
Then the process of social media listening from data extraction to decision making is ilustrated.
Finally, the article concludes with a discussion on the challenges and opportunities for the future of social media activities.
Happy reading!
Herrera, L.C.: Configuring social media listening practices in crisis management. In: 18th ISCRAM (2021)