International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 28 (2018) 565–577

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijdrr

Social media applications and emergency management: A literature review T

and research agenda
⁎
Sergio Luna, Michael J. Pennock
Stevens Institute of Technology Castle Point on Hudson, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Social media applications have proven to be a dependable communication channel even when traditional
Social media methods fail. Their application to emergency management offers new benefits to the domain. For instance,
Emergency management analysis of information as the event unfolds may increase situational awareness, news and alerts may reach
Socio-technical challenges larger audiences in less time and decision makers may monitor public activities as well as coordinate with
Complex systems
stakeholders. With such benefits, it seems the adoption of social media applications to emergency management
should be automatic. However, their implementation introduces risks as well. To better understand the benefits
and challenges, a review and analysis of the literature regarding the application of social media to emergency
management was conducted. Identified research gaps were mapped into social and technological challenges.
These challenges were then analyzed to set research directions for practitioners and researchers.

1. Introduction
The emergency management domain is facing an increase in com-
plexity and a decrease in the predictability of operational scenarios
[32]. Comprehensive analysis of events such as: Hurricane Katrina,
Hurricane Sandy, the earthquake and tsunami at Fukushima, Japan,
among others, indicate that traditional emergency management meth-
odologies have been overwhelmed by:
• Rapidly developing scenarios
• Increased numbers of participants
• Adoption of new technologies
• Large amounts of data to be collected and analyzed
Consequently, the implementation of traditional emergency man-
agement activities, which follow a hierarchical approach, result in se-
vere economic impacts, loss of human lives, loss of morale and con-
fidence in government institutions, and threats to national security
[58]. Therefore, to mitigate the impacts of disasters, experts suggest
focusing research efforts on developing more flexible and adaptable
strategies that are able to cope with such dynamic and uncertain en-
vironments.
One possible way to facilitate such strategies is to leverage social
media. In short, social media could provide timely and widespread data
collection to improve situational awareness during rapidly evolving
situations as well as provide a reliable communication channel with the
public when more traditional means fail. Given these characteristics, it
would seem as if its adoption for emergency management should be
automatic. However, it turns out that there are still substantial chal-
lenges regarding the application of social media that must be addressed
for it to realize its full potential in the emergency management domain.
One way to understand these challenges is to view disaster response
through the lens of complexity science. As will subsequently be dis-
cussed, disaster response exhibits all the characteristics of a complex
system, and these are increasing with time. Applying a well-known
principle from complexity science suggests that emergency managers
must employ equally complex methods to keep up. While the features of
social media suggest that it is sufficiently complex to serve that pur-
pose, a deeper investigation reveals that social media itself exacerbates
the problem. This double-edged aspect of social media in emergency
management contributes to the challenges of leveraging it effectively.
To provide context for these challenges, this article aims to under-
stand the following through a detailed analysis of the literature: 1) how
social media applications have been used during emergency events in
the past, 2) how social media applications can potentially support the
emergency management lifecycle and the activities performed by
emergency managers, and 3) the underlying complexities with regard
to the effective use of social media applications. The ultimate goal is to
identify research challenges, which if addressed, will enable more ef-
fective use of social media in the emergency management domain.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 in-
troduces the approach implemented to analyze the literature to identify

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: sluna@stevens.edu (S. Luna), mpennock@stevens.edu (M.J. Pennock).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2018.01.006
Received 6 October 2017; Received in revised form 7 January 2018; Accepted 8 January 2018
Available online 10 January 2018
2212-4209/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
S. Luna, M.J. Pennock
research gaps. Section 3 reviews the evolution and current state of
emergency management in the United States. Section 4 explores the
concept of social media applications, their capabilities, and im-
plementation during emergency events. It also identifies the benefits
and challenges they bring to emergency management. Based on the
analysis from the previous sections, Section 5 presents a research
agenda that describes several outstanding issues regarding the appli-
cation of social media to emergency management that require addi-
tional research to enable social media to reach its full potential.
2. Approach
This article presents a detailed analysis of social media use during
emergency situations as well as research directions for practitioners and
researchers in the application of social media to disaster response.
We began by defining social media as any Web 2.0 application that
allows users to generate, consume and exchange content. We then
searched both the scientific literature (journal articles, conference
proceedings, books, etc.) and official literature such as: U.S government
documents, non-government organization policies, training manuals,
and official reports. Scientific literature was obtained by via Google
Scholar as well as specialized sources such as: International Journal of
Disaster Risk Reduction (IJDRR), International Journal of Mass
Emergencies and Disasters, and Information Systems for Crisis Response
and Management (ISCRAM).
Our search included the terms: “social media”, “social media ap-
plications, “Web 2.0”, “crisis response”, “emergency management”,
“disaster response”, “online networks”, and “crisis management”.
All sources relevant to our topic, based on the title, were initially
analyzed by examining their abstract, introduction and conclusion.
Those that were relevant to our topic were examined in detail for ap-
proval. Once all approved sources were evaluated, we used a grounded
theory approach to cluster the sources by relevant topics [39]. In-
ductive coding facilitated the emergence of social media and emergency
management categories. For instance, clusters of social media use,
benefits, and challenges during disaster scenarios emerged from lit-
erature. Lastly, the groups of sources were evaluated for similarities and
differences; the results of such analysis are then reflected as sections in
our article.
3. Emergency management in the United States
This section focuses on evaluating emergency management strate-
gies from the United States perspective due to the vast amount of lit-
erature found; however, the cited literature reflects the fact that these
approaches are being used around the globe, and the phenomena are
not limited to the United States.
Historical analysis of emergency management in the United States
shows that the concept of emergency management has evolved over
time, and primarily a disaster-driven approach has been adopted. Major
changes in the structure of emergency management have been devel-
oped in response to the following factors: disaster events, political in-
terests, and presidential leadership style. Initially, FEMA had its foun-
dations based on military principles. Therefore, the hierarchical or top-
down principles were followed when developing response strategies.
[34,41]. Nevertheless, a shift in perspective has taken place in emer-
gency management, as can be observed in the 2011 Whole Community
Approach [31]. This section discusses the evolution of the emergency
management approaches implemented by FEMA.
3.1. FEMA approaches to emergency management
Despite the fact that the federal government created an emergency
management office, there is no agreement among researchers, practi-
tioners, and government organizations for the definition of disaster. For
instance, FEMA defines disaster as “An occurrence of a natural
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International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 28 (2018) 565–577
catastrophe, technological incident, or human-caused event that has
resulted in severe property damage, deaths, and or multiple injuries”
[23]. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent So-
cieties described disasters as “… a sudden, calamitous event that ser-
iously disrupts the functioning of a community or society and causes
human, material, and economic or environmental losses that exceed the
community's or society's ability to cope using its own resources. Though
often caused by nature, disasters can have human origins” [47]. Simi-
larly, The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction identified
disaster as “A serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a
society at any scale due to hazardous events interacting with conditions
of exposure, vulnerability and capacity, leading to one or more of the
following: human, material, economic and environmental losses and
impacts” [107].
Therefore, disasters are events that disrupt a community's func-
tionality because it lacks the resources necessary to cope with a hazard.
According to Haddow, Bullock and Coppola [41], a disaster may have
three different origins: natural, technological and human-made. Natural
disasters are those caused by mother earth. These events present the
characteristic that some of them could exhibit properties that allow
them to be forecasted while others seem to occur without any warning
signs. Technological disaster refers to those caused by human errors in
controlling technology or a malfunction of a technological system.
Lastly, human-caused disasters are those events caused by humans, who
may or may not have the intention to harm others.
To establish a common understanding for disasters, researchers and
practitioners have identified four properties present in all disasters,
which include: [1,6,84].
• Length of forewarning – Describes the timescale for disaster ac-
tion. Some events present little or no warning time such as earth-
quakes or terrorist attacks. While others provide longer warning
time, which provides additional time for implementing suitable re-
sponse plans. Examples of these events include hurricanes and
snowstorms.
• Magnitude of impact – It measures or quantifies the severity of the
events. Richter scale, hurricane categories I-V, and radiation level
are only some metrics to measure disasters.
• Geographical scope – Disasters hit a specific geographic location.
However, their impact can be spread to contiguous areas.
• Impact duration – This property seeks to quantify the time length
of a disaster. A catastrophic event may take seconds, minutes, days,
months or even years, depending on the event. For instance, an
earthquake can be felt for a few seconds while an economic reces-
sion may take years to form.
These attributes have assisted decision makers in the classification
of hazards as well as in the development of strategies to cope with
disasters. For instance, the Federal Emergency Management Agency
[34] has taken two different perspectives to emergency management.
The Traditional Approach and the Professional Approach.
3.1.1. The traditional approach to emergency management
The traditional approach to emergency management is also referred
to as bureaucratic or command and control [34]. In traditional
methods, disaster management is addressed from a single perspective:
the government's perspective. Dynes [28] asserts that a military format
facilitates the implementation of a strict set of objectives, policies and a
well-defined division of activities among its departments. In a similar
line, Schneider [90] recognizes that the American disaster response
approach is dominated by a strict set of norms, and it consists of bu-
reaucratic policies and processes where emergent norms are not ac-
cepted. Thus, adaptation to unexpected tasks and involvement of more
groups is not recognized. Classic approaches are characterized by
adopting a hierarchical structure. Neal and Phillips [71] state that
under a command and control approach, decision-making and
S. Luna, M.J. Pennock
Table 1
Comparison of FEMA's approaches to emergency management.
Traditional Approach
Development Categorize disasters according to the level of importance. Focus
on civilian hazard, war and nuclear. (Cold War US-USSR).
Approach Hierarchical and top-bottom approach.
Adaptation Level Rigid strategies do not allow adaptation to new scenarios.
Player Perspective Only one agency participating, the government.
Public Interfere with responses or not participate at all. Panic behavior.
Information gathered from non- It is not trusted.
governmental agencies
First Responders Only count for emergency management agencies.
communications become centralized, while considering that public
decisions are made rationally. Therefore, emergency managers see
emergent behavior as unacceptable and tend to prevent it [71,90]. An
example of a traditional approach to emergency management is the
Federal Civil Defense Act presented in 1950.
Classic approaches to emergency management were developed
under the following assumptions: [12,29,71,91]
• Government emergency management agencies are expected to be
the only responders during disaster events
• Government is required to direct and control all disaster operations
• Hierarchical agency classification and disaster priority. War is the
top priority
• Information transmitted by non-government institutions should not
be trusted
• Effective emergency response is the result of normal, rational,
written bureaucratic procedures
• Policies, standards, and operational procedures will always be ap-
plicable and effective
• Citizens respond ineffectively or do not respond at all
• Public behaviors always involve panic, looting or other anti-social
activities. Emergent groups interfere with government response
operations
The September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina
are some examples of how traditional emergency response strategies
have been tested. During these events, Bolton and Stolcis [11] identi-
fied that the rapidly developing scenarios caused significant confusion
among emergency managers, who relied on rigid and static mitigation
plans. Implemented strategies were overwhelmed by the events them-
selves [41]. Thus, managers’ confusion and inability to implement
proper strategies was reflected in delayed services and tardy resource
and staff allocation, exacerbating the number of casualties, as well as
economic and infrastructure damages. The Federal Emergency Man-
agement Agency [33] in its Crisis Response and Disaster Resilience
2030 manuscript states that emergency management will encounter
new and more complex challenges. Therefore, strategies that mitigate
the possible impacts must be developed. The challenges identified by
FEMA include:
• New and unknown operational scenarios
• Increased number of disaster events
• More information to be analyzed with possibly less time to process it
• Adoption and development of new technologies
• Increase in the number of participants
• High public expectations
Following FEMA's direction, traditional emergency management
approaches seem to be insufficient to address the future challenges
FEMA expects and is preparing for [71]. Consequently, new paradigms
must be formulated to account for such challenges.
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International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 28 (2018) 565–577
Professional Approach
Understand there are more types of disaster scenarios than war and
nuclear disasters. Natural disasters are also considered.
Horizontal relationships, networks.
Seek to implement flexible strategies.
Multiple: Government, citizens, non-profit organizations, etc.
It is a resource and supports operations.
It is acknowledged that information could be beneficial but also it
may generate new challenges.
Public might be the first responders.
3.1.2. The professional approach to emergency management
The Federal Emergency Management Agency [34] professional ap-
proach recognizes that emergency management is a decentralized net-
work of organizations that collaborate to mitigate the impacts of dis-
asters. For instance, local police and fire departments, public works,
volunteers and government entities coordinate activities before, during
and after a disaster occurs. Also, it understands that civilians support
recovery strategies rather than interfere with them. In contrast to the
Traditional Approach, this method acknowledges that public informa-
tion may support emergency activities. The public is recognized to be
the first emergency responder because they experience the event.
Therefore, public participation is accepted and welcomed rather than
ignored. Also, the flexibility of the professional approach allows the
implementation of its strategies to multiple types of disasters; strategies
developed are not constrained to one specific disaster anymore. An
example to the professional approach includes the Whole Community
Approach introduced by FEMA in 2011.
To better understand differences between the Traditional and the
Professional approach to emergency management, Table 1 presents a
comparison based on their development, approach, adaptation level,
player perspective, information gathered and first responders.
3.2. Emergency management as a complex system
Practitioners and scholars are becoming reluctant to rely on tradi-
tional emergency management activities [11,97]. Events such as Sep-
tember 11th and Hurricane Katrina are examples of “decisional pa-
ralysis” due to over-reliance of static techniques that hinder
information sharing when in need.
More recently, researchers and practitioners have started to view
emergency management through the lens of complexity science. For
instance, Cavallo and Ireland [16] advocate that the impacts of natural
and human-made disasters might be exacerbated by risk interconnec-
tions that are not captured by traditional linear models. O'Sullivan [74]
asserts that community resilience increases by migrating from a tradi-
tional command and control approach to understanding the complex-
ities of community response, stakeholders’ collaboration, and inter-
dependencies between different aspects of emergency management.
Kapucu [53] examined the effectiveness of coordinating interactions
among emergency managers, technology, members of government en-
tities, and individual citizens. Development of resilient communities
can be supported by capturing and grasping complex interactions be-
tween stakeholders. Casti [14] affirms that disaster events follow non-
linear paths. Consequently, they may not be able to be forecasted. Also,
Comfort [19] states that intergovernmental crisis management could be
reframed as a complex adaptive system that adapts its performance to
best fit the demands of the environment. It then facilitates the process
of cognition, communication, coordination and control among stake-
holders. Tan et al. [101] acknowledge that crisis management possess
the characteristics of complexity science. Relationships among in-
dividuals, organizations, infrastructure and technology result in emer-
gent behavior that is difficult to predict. Lastly, Simonovic [97] defines
S. Luna, M.J. Pennock
Percentage of adults in the United States with at least one social media
profile
80%
70%
Percentage of U.S Adults
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10% 5%
0%
1/14/04 5/28/05 10/10/06 2/22/08 7/6/09 11/18/10 4/1/12 8/14/13 12/27/14 5/10/16 9/22/17
Date
management of disasters as an integrated system comprised of four
subsystems: individuals, organizations, society and environment.
Emergency management is then achieved by a set of inputs, outputs and
feedback loops among subsystems.
In brief, viewing emergency management through the lens of
complexity science recognizes that disaster response exhibits the
characteristics of the Professional Approach. Also, emergency man-
agement may benefit from complexity science since it may provide
insights as to how to balance control mechanisms during incremental or
rapidly developing scenarios. To better understand complex systems, it
is necessary to recognize their properties. According to Rouse and
Serban [87], McDermott et al. [68] and Holland [44], complex systems
present the following characteristics:
• Nonlinearity- Complex systems are dynamical and do not present
fixed equilibrium points.
• Multi-agents- Systems are composed of multiple agents, each of
them governed by its own interests, beliefs and goals.
• Learning and adaptation – Agents are able to acquire knowledge
from interacting with other agents and/or their surrounding en-
vironment. Also, agents are able to adapt their behavior as they
learn from the outcomes of their previously taken actions.
• Self-organization – Agents are able to interact and create networks
or groups with shared objectives. Learning and adaptation are
achieved via feedback loops. New behavior emerges from agents’
interaction.
• There is no single point of control – System behavior is not con-
trollable. However, it may be influenced.
As has been noted, experts suggest that emergency situations exhibit
all these characteristics. Hence, it seems to be evident that disaster
response strategies should incorporate complexity science principles.
This research recognizes emergency management as a complex
system because it understands that emergency situations are rapid
evolving environments that cannot be controlled. Stakeholders colla-
borate during all four phases of emergency management. However,
each of them is regulated by its own interests, beliefs, and objectives.
Collaboration among stakeholders is achieved through feedback loops.
In addition, stakeholders exchange resources, such as information and
data, which facilitate the decision-making process. Evaluation of out-
comes based on their previously taken actions permits stakeholders to
learn from their experiences and support the adoption of new decisions
like implementing new response strategies for when the next event
occurs. It is in this context that social media is particularly relevant to
emergency management.
Proper coordination is critical to mitigate the impacts of disasters.
According to Reddy et al. [83], rapidly changing scenarios make co-
ordination more challenging. It is understood that participants rely on
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International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 28 (2018) 565–577
Fig. 1. Illustrates the increase in social media users in the United
States from 2005 to 2016. Data obtained from Pew Research
Center [77].
69%
communication channels for: coordination, providing and seeking in-
formation, connecting with loved ones, among others. Social media
applications have gained significant interest in emergency management
since the first time they were employed in 2005 during Hurricane Ka-
trina [103]. It has been observed that during disasters participants
utilize social media applications as a communication channel due to
their ability to continue operating even when other methods fail
[98,112].
Paraphrasing Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety [4], for every com-
plex problem, there must be a complex solution. The conclusion one can
draw from the literature discussed in this section is that the traditional
approach to emergency management is insufficiently complex to ad-
dress modern disasters. The professional approach to emergency man-
agement, when observed through the lens of complexity science, is a
recognition of this conclusion. In line with Ashby's Law, actually im-
plementing the professional approach requires the development of
supporting methods and tools that exhibit sufficient complexity. As will
be discussed in the next section, social media would seem to provide
sufficient flexibility and adaptability to allow it to be the complex so-
lution that could improve the emergency management domain.
Nevertheless, it also brings new challenges that must be addressed to
understand how social media applications can support emergency
management effectively. The next section describes the advantages and
challenges of social media in emergency management.
4. Social media applications in the context of emergency
management
4.1. Social media
The first social media application, SixDegrees.com, was introduced
in 1997, reaching an estimate of 3.5 million registered users [40]. More
recently, the Pew Research Center [77] estimates that 69% of the
United States adult population owns at least one social media profile.
That is an increase from 5% in 2005 as seen in Fig. 1.
According to Houston, et al. [45] the term social media is a com-
prehensive concept for a variety of internet-based platforms and ser-
vices that operate under the principles of Web 2.0. Thus, social media
applications allow users to generate, share, and consume content al-
most in real-time [52]. Images, videos, text, and geo-locations are only
some of the features that can be exchanged among users. Their flex-
ibility and adaptability facilitate the development of multiple applica-
tions, each with different capabilities. In Table 2, Fraustino, Liu and Jin
[35] classify social media applications according to their properties.
Another categorization method is presented in the marketing do-
main. Edwards [30] classifies social media applications into five groups
to support experts when developing advertising strategies:
S. Luna, M.J. Pennock International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 28 (2018) 565–577

Table 2
Types of Web 2.0 applications and their capabilities developed by Faustino, Liu and Jin [35].

Application Type Description Example

Blogs Interactive virtual journal that allows users to express opinions, share thoughts, promote ideas, WordPress, Blogger, HubPages
etc.
Discussion Forums Online bulletin board where users are able to post questions/concerns and expect to receive bbPress, LiveJournal
responses to the message left.
Micro-blogs Short version of blogs. Users share content in a limited space. Twitter, Tumblr
Photo/Video and Podcasting Exchange of multimedia content, images, video and audio. YouTube, Instagram
Social Bookmarking Platform that allows users to add, edit, share bookmarks. Delicious, Google
Social Discovery Engines & News Bulletin board where users post news, links, pictures, etc. and vote for ranking their priority. Reddit, Pulse, StumbleUpon
Sources
Social/Professional Networking Environment where users communicate with others. User profile is required to establish a list of LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+
connections with whom to share information.
Social Rating Reviews Platform where users are able to rate and describe experiences that others can comment and share. Yelp, TripAdvisor
Video/Text Chatting Multimedia platform that allows users to establish dialogue via text or video. Skype, WhatsApp, WeChat
Wikis Website that allows users to create, edit and delete content. There is no defined content owner in Wikipedia, Wikispaces
comparison to blogs.

• Interact with others and share information about brands
• Updates about news and activities tailoring trending topics and viral
campaigns
• Location-based services tracking and prospects for new sells
• Social gaming
• Social couponing is utilized when consumers influence each other
while at the same time sell items
In essence, the term social media refers to the collection of appli-
cations that facilitate content sharing. Nowadays, social media appli-
cations have become a primary communication channel. Their flex-
ibility and adaptability have motivated other domains to understand
their principles, develop new applications and exploit their benefits.
Examples of studies in other disciplines include: politics where
Tumasjan et al. [106] aimed to predict the German federal election
using public sentiment obtained from Twitter. In marketing, Mangold
and Faulds [66] studied how the way organizations communicate with
consumers has recently changed. Enterprises should monitor and par-
ticipate in consumer-to-consumer discussions to shape the conversation
in a manner that is consistent with the enterprise's mission. In educa-
tion, Davis et al. [22] estimate that more than 90% of college students
have a social media profile. In response, higher education institutions
are adopting social media profiles to deliver academic content, provide
student support, build and strengthen a sense of community, expand
alumni networks, and advertise their academic offerings. Lastly, in
Healthcare Antheunis, Tates and Nieboer [2] investigated the manner
in which providers and patients use social media applications. Findings
showed that patients primarily used social networks for increasing
knowledge and exchanging advice while providers mostly used them
for communication with colleagues and marketing purposes.
Emergency management has not been the exception when trying to
understand the phenomena of social media. Research indicates that one
of the first disaster scenarios where social media was employed was
during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 [41,103]. It is also recognized as the
inflection point for understanding the benefits and implementing social
media applications. For instance, Houston et al. [45] recognize five
classes of social media users in emergency management. These include:
individuals, communities, organizations, governments, and news
media. All users generate, consume, and exchange content during all-
phases of emergency management. In addition, Houston et al. [45]
identified fifteen different uses of social media applications during
disasters along with the emergency management phase. For instance,
social media uses during the Pre-Event phase include: provide and re-
ceive disaster information. The functions from Pre-Event to Event phase
involve signaling and detection of disasters. Also, uses at the Event
phase include, send and receive assistance requests, as well as, inform
others about location and condition status. The stage with the most uses
identified by Houston et al. [45] is the Event to Post-Event phase with
seven out of fifteen functions occurring at this stage. The uses identified
during Event to Post-Event include: document how the disaster is
evolving, provide or consume news content, provide and consume
disaster information, promote and receive donations, provide in-
formation on how to volunteer, provide and receive behavioral health
assistance, communicate emotions, memorialize victims, and finally,
disseminate information about disaster response and recovery efforts.
Functions at the Post-Event phase include connecting or reconnecting
with members of the community and discussing socio-political and
scientific causes and consequences as well as responsibility. Lastly,
activities covering Pre-Event to Post-Event include the implementation
of traditional crisis communication activities.
Social media users have been exploiting social media capabilities
when in need, even though they were not primarily intended for
emergency situations. For instance, the earthquake and tsunami that
occurred in Fukushima, Japan (2011) caused disruptions on telephone
service lines. Consequently, service providers limited the number of
voice calls up to 80%, driving the public to search for other commu-
nication mechanisms. In that case, microblogging and video conference
tools were the solution the Japanese public needed. In that event,
Twitter and Skype became popular applications because they continued
operating despite limited service due to heavy congestion and power
outages [112]. More recently, during Hurricane Harvey the emergency
number 911 was overloaded. Emergency dispatchers were over-
whelmed by the number of calls and asked residents to wait in line.
Consequently, affected citizens turned to social media applications to
request assistance [20]. Thanks to social media, affected users were
able to communicate with family members, which provided a means for
people to learn the status of their relatives.
Social media's flexibility and adaptability made its application to
other types of disasters much easier. Applications were used by Virginia
Tech's students during a school shooting as well as during the Southern
California wildfires in 2007 [93,110]. In both events, the public had
significant participation. Social media applications were primarily used
to exchange information, coordinate activities, provide scenario de-
scription, among others [76]. After such events, researchers acknowl-
edged that the public experiencing a disaster could function as a
backchannel mechanism by providing real-time information that may
assist practitioners in the implementation of more effective response
strategies [99].
Table 3 illustrates some disaster events where social media has been
utilized. The volume of data generated has subsequently increased as
the number of users who rely on social media continue growing
[35,112].
Emergency response organizations recognize the benefits of social
media. For instance, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

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S. Luna, M.J. Pennock
Table 3
Social media usage during disasters.
Event Details
Hurricane Katrina 2005 [35] • 73% of civilians monitored websites for major news.
• Citizens utilized social media to communicate with relatives.
Haiti Earthquake 2010 [35] • Twitter was the primary mechanism for communication.
• Traditional
Japan Earthquake and Tsunami 2011 [112] • Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Waze, Mixi, etc. continued operating even when the telephone lines were down.
• Twitter reached about 1200 tweets per minute coming from Tokyo.
Hurricane Sandy 2012 [35] • Twitter was used for communication reaching 1.1 million tweets in 21 h.
• On Facebook, Sandy became the 2nd most talked about topic of the year.
through the National Preparedness Report describes the current state of
social media capabilities implemented by emergency agencies [24]. The
document also presents the goal to implement the Whole Community
approach, which describes the need to integrate emergency response
stakeholders to face hazards that challenge common wellbeing.
Government, non-government organizations (NGOs), faith-based
organizations, communities and individuals have all been identified as
key participants. For instance, there are agencies at different govern-
ment levels, as in the case of the city of Hoboken, New Jersey
(@CityofHoboken), The Tennessee Emergency Management Agency
(@T_E_M_A) at the state level, and the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (@FEMA) at the federal level. Non-government organizations
(NGOs) include the American Red Cross (@RedCross) and the Lions
Club International Foundation (@lionsclub). Lastly, examples of faith-
based entities consist of the Salvation Army USA (@SalvationArmyUS)
and the Trinity Church at Wall Street (@TrinityWallSt). In brief, all of
these emergency management stakeholders have social media presence,
and more importantly these organizations stay active during the
emergency management lifecycle. Such uses of social media are con-
sistent with DHS's emergency management concepts by facilitating
coordination among stakeholders and simultaneously offering me-
chanisms that can be implemented during any of the four phases of
emergency management.
As it has been noted, social media applications seem to be consistent
with the professional approach to disaster management developed by
FEMA as well as with the complexity science principles. Public parti-
cipation, decentralization of activities, networks of social media users
and fast dissemination of information offers significant benefits to the
domain. The next section elaborates on the benefits of social media with
respect to emergency management.
4.2. Social media benefits to emergency management
4.2.1. Increase situational awareness
In emergency management, Trainor and Subbio [103] state that
situational awareness “describes human perceptions of the multifaceted
circumstances around a crisis event that allow for interpreting situa-
tions, making decisions and predicting future outcomes.” Thus, situa-
tional awareness refers to humans understanding what is occurring in
their surrounding environment, in this case a disaster event. Harrald
and Jefferson [42] identified requirements for increasing situational
awareness: (1) obtaining data relevant to the goal one is trying to
achieve, (2) data collected should provide a significant description of
situation, (3) data should be enough to allow understanding the re-
lationships among components, (4) data should provide enough in-
formation to facilitate development of potential future states and, (5)
data should be able to facilitate the decision-making process.
Mobile technologies and social media applications would seem to
fulfill the requirements to increase situational awareness. Users have
the ability to take pictures, video, and establish conversations almost in
real-time, facilitating the dissemination of information and establishing
communications with loved ones and authorities. Goodchild [38] sug-
gests the analogy that humans are sensors who provide information
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 28 (2018) 565–577
media, one-way communication such as TV and radio, was utilized by civilians for news updates.
during and after a disaster. Lindsay [62] suggests that by monitoring
information flows, situational awareness can be established. For in-
stance, when Hurricane Sandy (2012) hit the Northeast coast of the
United States, more than 20 million tweets were posted on Twitter in a
five-day period. Emergency managers actively attempted to monitor the
traffic in Twitter to increase their situational awareness. They also
engaged in conversations with the public to clarify doubts, correct ru-
mors, and deliver disaster relief information [25]. Shari, Buehner and
Palenchar [93] illustrate how the information exchanged during dis-
asters as in the case of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting and the 2007
California wildfires may assist practitioners to establish common
ground. Also, Vieweg et al. [111] analyzed tweets from the 2009 Red
River Floods and 2009 Oklahoma City Fires, suggesting that social
media content may provide relevant information for situational up-
dates.
As has been noted in previous examples, social media applications
may provide valuable information as an event unfolds. This may result
in improved decision making by users and responders.
4.2.2. Faster information diffusion
Social media applications rely on internet services to operate. The
World Wide Web was first mapped by Barabasi and Albert [7] as a
scale-free network, a concept frequently employed in complexity sci-
ence. In their work, they found that only a few nodes have a large
number of connections while most of nodes have a limited number of
connections. In other words, in social networks a few individuals are
considered “influencers” or “hubs” as could be the case for public fig-
ures. In essence, public figures have a large number of followers or fans
while those same followers have a scarce number of fans. A similar
phenomena is replicated in emergency management. Influential mem-
bers of the community, authorities and non-government institutions
have a large number of social media followers compared to the general
public, which tends to have a limited number of connections. Doerr,
Fouz and Friedrich [27] studied rumors in social networks concluding
that network topology plays a key role on how the information is dis-
seminated. They conclude that social media spreads information faster
than any other network topology. In the same line, with the aim to
understand how viruses propagate through different network topolo-
gies, Berger et al. [9] concluded that viruses disseminate faster on the
internet or scale-free networks than any other topology analyzed. Ne-
kovee et al. [72] compared dissemination rates of random graphs and
scale-free networks. He found that scale-free networks offer faster dis-
semination rates compared to random graphs. In addition, social in-
fluence plays a critical role on how information is disseminated and
adopted. Bakshy et al. [5] defined that individuals with similar pre-
ferences tend to form clusters. Thus, individuals with similar interests
favor the formation of groups with similar characteristics.
As defined by Doerr, Fouz and Friedrich [27], the backbone of social
media is the scale-free network topology. Its properties allow faster
information dissemination rates that could significantly support emer-
gency management at any of its operational phases. During emergency
situations, information is key to coordination, response and recovery
actions. Having information on time might be the difference between
570
S. Luna, M.J. Pennock
life or death or millions of dollars lost in infrastructure. Social media
applications may support agile coordination among participants before,
during and after a disaster.
4.2.3. Monitoring activities and stakeholder coordination
Rapid communication among stakeholders is facilitated through the
common platform social media offers to emergency management. It has
been observed that social media use increases during a disaster as
people are continuously seeking information [35].
After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, emergency managers recognized
that social media is an important communication channel during
emergency situations. For instance, United States agencies such as the
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. State
Department, and the U.S. Armed Forces relied on social media appli-
cations to coordinate actions between agencies [96,114].
In addition, Teodorescu [102] indicates that monitoring social
media activity supports officials in understanding public sentiment and
reactions to government responses. Sentiment analysis provides offi-
cials information to adapt emergency plans to mitigate public concerns.
Furthermore, it has been noticed that during emergency situations a
high volume of data is transmitted among users. As in the case of
hurricane Sandy with more than 20 million and during Fukushima an
estimate of 177 million tweets were exchanged [3]. To monitor real-
time user activities, researchers have developed several systems that
support the analysis of social media streams. For instance, Tapia, Moore
and Johnson [100] developed the Enhance Messaging for the Emer-
gency Response Sector (EMERSE), a tool that classifies text messages
and tweets so that officials can easily go over the data and understand
public sentiment. Also, Caragea et al. [13] introduced Disaster Tech
Lab, a monitoring platform implemented during hurricane Sandy to
map and respond to user requests. In another example, the Department
of Homeland Security [26] recognizes the Clark Regional Emergency
Services Agency (CRESA). In CRESA, the emergency manager cate-
gorizes channels from Twitter which include: local, state and national
news, public and response agencies. The public is classified into local
and non-local to better understand data and isolate those that are not
relevant for the area. Data collection is constrained to the area affected.
This facilitates mapping via geo-location. In addition, trending topics or
specific hashtag search is feasible in CRESA allowing rapid and specific
response to emerging events. In a similar line, Purohit and Sheth [81]
developed Twitris which is a Twitter based automatic classifier of
tweets that utilizes geo-location and semantics. Lastly, [78] introduced
SA: Emergency Situation Awareness, a Twitter powered tool that clas-
sifies, clusters, and geo-tags tweets.
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International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 28 (2018) 565–577
4.3. Social media challenges to emergency management
The literature discussed in the previous section indicates that
emergency management may benefit from social media applications.
The flexibility and adaptability of social media addresses some of the
complexity challenges of emergency management. However, the lit-
erature also indicates that the application of social media brings new
challenges to emergency management. In some cases, social media
actually exaggerates the previously described complexity challenges. In
this section, we elaborate on the identified challenges introduced by
social media.
Fig. 2 is an updated illustration of the challenges identified by Luna
and Pennock [65]. They summarized the challenges social media pose
to emergency management and organized these into two groups: social
and technical.
4.3.1. Social challenges
Social challenges are those that emerge from participant interac-
tions. Interactions of interest are among the members of the public,
between the public and participating organizations, and among the
organizations themselves.
According to the International Organization for Standardization
(ISO), the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), and the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), interoperability
is defined as the “degree to which two or more systems, products or
components can exchange information and use the information that has
been exchanged” [48]. In emergency management, proper coordination
among participants must exist during emergency situations to provide
effective assistance. Nevertheless, Kaigo [50] and Wallop [112] re-
cognize that when in need, stakeholders do not react in the most effi-
cient manner. Interoperability issues include transmission of mis-
information, rumors and cascading information flow. The rapid way
social media spreads information is beneficial in emergency manage-
ment, if the information being disseminated is true. However, Karlova
and Fisher [55] assert that if the information spread is outdated, in-
accurate or false, participants could take counterproductive actions that
might exacerbate the negative impacts of disasters. The speed of mes-
sage transmission, particularly false information, can result in severe
consequences in emergency situations [64]. For instance, during dis-
asters information such as event characteristics, citizens’ concerns,
event images and several similar elements are disseminated via social
media applications such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. The
concern remains when the information is shared across user networks
without validation by authorities. Transmission of noise, in this case
outdated, inaccurate or false information, proves to be significant as it
may alter the perception and decision-making process of social media
Fig. 2. Challenges introduced by social media applications to the
emergency management domain (Updated from [65]).
S. Luna, M.J. Pennock International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 28 (2018) 565–577

Table 4
Events where outdated, inaccurate, or false information was disseminated via social media.

Year Event Counterproductive Consequences

2008 Oh (2013) Mumbai Terrorist Attack • Incorrect reports of explosions were disseminated via Twitter.
2010 Castillo, Mendoza
and Poblete [15]
Indonesian Emergency
Management Account
• Twitter account of Indonesian presidential adviser for emergency management was hacked. A false tsunami
warning alert was sent on his behalf.
2011 Karlova and Fisher Japan Earthquake and • Commuters walked unnecessary miles to find out that shelters and subways were not operating.
[54] Tsunami • Assistance was requested when victims were already rescued.

2012 DHS (2013b) Hurricane Sandy

• A hoax sent to a British channel stated that radiation was spreading across the Asian continent.
Inaccurate information related to:
• Bridge failures
• Lack of resources
• Shelter location
• Recovery status
• Weather reports

2014 Chen [17] Columbian Chemicals • Adisseminated

Russian organization generated a false emergency situation in Centerville, Louisiana. The organization
information about an explosion of a chemical plant igniting social media and generating serious
public concerns.
• Incommented
order to generate a realistic scenario, the organization created false Twitter accounts, posted false images and
on status to gain credibility.
2017 Potenza [79] Hurricane Harvey The spread of false rumors including:
•The City of Houston was checking immigration documents at shelters.
•Houston Bush Airport was completely flooded. Water level covered Delta planes.

users.
Actions taken based on outdated or uncertain information may
trigger a cascade of counterproductive behavior. One example is the
earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima where a rumor was spread
during the response phase. The rumor stated that hazardous materials
from an explosion in the Cosmo Oil Co. Ltd. were falling from the sky
along with rain, harming all those exposed to them [50]. Misinforma-
tion exacerbated the impact of the Tsunami resulting in a public
hoarding behavior. Rumors stating that vital goods were scarce when
they were not resulted in a shortage of drinking water, foods with long
shelf life, gasoline fuel, gas cartridges, and salt [50]. Thus, mis-
information in social media has the potential to exacerbate the impacts
of disasters. Finally, misinformation resulted in a loss of credibility for
government institutions. The Japanese government encouraged citizens
to return home during the recovery phase, while the radiation levels
were not within the accepted limits [61]. Citizens developed mixed
feelings which resulted in loss of morale and confidence in the gov-
ernment, slowing down the recovery efforts. Table 4 illustrates six
different scenarios where outdated, inaccurate or false information has
been disseminated through social media applications.
One challenge to identifying misinformation in social media appli-
cations is identifying irony in text-based applications. Sarcasm is con-
text, culture, and voice-tone dependent making it difficult to recognize
for some people. Thus, recognizing sarcasm properties in text-based
applications makes identification even more challenging and may cause
unintended consequences. Approaches developed to contain and re-
cognize sarcasm propagation in social media have been suggested. Tsur,
Davidov and Rappoport [104] proposed a semi-supervised algorithm to
recognize sarcasm in product reviews. Davidov, Tsur and Rappoport
[21] developed an algorithm to recognize sarcasm in Twitter and
Amazon. Reyes, Rosso and Buscaldi [85] created a classification model
for recognizing sarcasm based on representativeness and relevance.
Zhao, Lan and Zhu [116] suggested a method to identify early signals of
sarcasm based on text classification. Sakamoto, Huaye and Yuko [89]
asserted that collective truthfulness might reduce sharing of false in-
formation. Kwon et al. [57] proposed a method that classifies text based
on structural and linguistic patterns. A common denominator in all
previously mentioned approaches is the utilization of machine learning
techniques.
Practitioners and researchers understand that personal and cultural
experiences may shape the behavior of disasters [55,73]. As such, it is
important to understand human responses to disaster and how such
perceptions influence their social media usage.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency through its Strategic
Foresight Initiative [32] identifies key long-term trends and drivers that
might potentially affect emergency management activities. The identi-
fied drivers include:
• Increase in U.S. population
• Increase in elderly population
• Increase in racial and ethnic diversity
• Development of megaregions
• Increase in coastal population density
• Shifts in demographic structure
For instance, FEMA forecasts a shift in demographics in the next 35
years. The United States Census Bureau [108] estimates growth of the
U.S. population by 42% between 2010 and 2050. Also, the percentage
of elderly is estimated to grow from 12% to 21% by 2050. In addition,
the United States Census Bureau [109] forecasts an increase of

572
S. Luna, M.J. Pennock
minorities relative to the White population. Hispanics are expected to
reach 24%, African-American 15%, Asian 8%, and the White population
is expected to decrease from 81% to 72% by 2050 [32]. With this
transition of demographics, languages spoken in the U.S. are also ex-
pected to diversify. According to [94], the most common non-English
languages spoken in the US among the population 5 years and over by
2020 are forecast to be Spanish (62.6%), Chinese (4.7%), French
(2.8%), Tagalog (2.7%) and Vietnamese (2.3%). To complicate matters,
people are migrating to coastal and flood prone areas as well as creating
mega-regions [32]. Bertot et al. [10] assert that officials must account
for language barriers, social stratification, age, educational level;
however, research considering these factors is limited. Therefore, Me-
jova, Weber and Macy [70] state that with such expected shifts in de-
mographics, it is necessary to understand the presence and usage of
social media applications by the multiple demographic groups.
Lastly, the features of social media applications allow any user to
create or open an account on behalf of another individual or entity
leading to stakeholder universality. Consequently, this characteristic
facilitates the creation of false social media profiles. Individuals or or-
ganizations with malicious intentions may take advantage of fictitious
profiles to disseminate incorrect information or infiltrate into proprie-
tary databases. Their goal is to inflict harm.
4.3.2. Technical challenges
Technical challenges are defined as limitations in governing the
physical and logistical resources required to support the functioning
and maintenance of social media applications.
The rapid adaptation of social media applications has outpaced the
existing regulatory frameworks, which leads to the development of poor
quality data [42,60]. Therefore, Lindsay [62] suggests that standards,
processes, and regulations should be developed to better manage the
information disseminated through social media applications.
In a related issue, data ownership has not been well defined. Bertot
et al. [10] understand that application developers are the primary
content owners. However, the authors point out that when a disaster
occurs, government agencies have not yet defined who will manage the
applications and for how long the records will be kept. As stated by
White and Plotnick [113], a lack of a well-defined architecture results
in interoperability challenges among stakeholders. Gao et al. [36] em-
phasize that the amount of content generated during disasters is ex-
pected to increase as the number of users adopt new applications.
However, there are no estimates on what human and capital resources
are needed to store, manipulate and analyze the data. Therefore, data
manipulation protocols and training manuals should be developed for
future reference.
System security is one of the topics that concerns the public the
most. As Trainor and Subbio [103] and Fraustino, Liu and Jin [35]
indicate, questions regarding who has access to their information and
how that information is managed results in reluctant adoption of social
media applications. Also, data security is of interest to policy makers.
For instance, Lindsay [62] concluded that unauthorized access to data
and information infrastructure may result in damage to strategic per-
sonnel or resources creating or exacerbating potential damages.
Social media monetization is defined as the strategy of how a social
media provider earns revenue and provides value to its stakeholders
[105]. The challenge with a monetization model is that it may cause
users to lose interest in certain applications. Lipowicz [63] remarks that
as social media applications migrate from nonprofit to for-profit, they
are exposed to losing users, credibility, or user activity. This especially
occurs when applications transition from an ad-free version to an in-app
advertising model or when the number of advertisements increase
significantly. Furthermore, Clemons [18] stated that approaching users
with an excess of marketing material may cause the public to lose in-
terest. The concern in the emergency management domain is that the
public could ignore or be diverted away from critical government
messages. The impact of monetization approaches in general needs to
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International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 28 (2018) 565–577
be considered as they may diminish the utility of social media for
emergency management.
Also, data from social media applications lacks a well-defined
structure, hence their integration with relational databases is infeasible.
Social media data may include special characters and emojis, making
the analysis and derivation of meaning a difficult task to perform [70].
Lastly, the development and implementation of new emergency man-
agement activities are limited by the amount of data that emergency
managers are able to process. As Imran et al. [46] stated, information
overload and information prioritization should be addressed to make
use of social media data for situational awareness. For instance, during
Hurricane Sandy, it was difficult for stakeholders to monitor and extract
valuable information from more than 20 million crowdsourced tweets
[69]. In an analogy, emergency managers face the “needle in a hay-
stack” phenomena; they are continuously searching for key information
in a large volume of data to help them detect, monitor, and gain in-
formation for situational awareness. Thus, finding the “needle” or key
information will enable emergency managers to make more informed
decisions.
4.4. Summary of benefits and challenges
In brief, the implementation of social media applications to disaster
response provides new benefits to the domain such as:
• Situational awareness,
• Faster information diffusion,
• Monitoring activities and stakeholder coordination.
However, their adoption introduces new challenges including:
• Interoperability issues, misinterpretation by the public, and rumors
• Stakeholder stratification
• Stakeholder demographics
• Stakeholder universality
• Absence of standards and regulations regarding their use
• System architecture: Definition of ownership and information flows.
• Data infrastructure: What storage capabilities are needed? What
amount of personnel and tools are required to analyze the vast
amount of data?
• System and data security: Who will have access to the data? What if
security is violated?
• Monetization: What are the consequences to migrate from a non-
profit to for-profit social media application?
• Social media data attributes: How to generate knowledge from un-
structured data during emergency situations?
This research domain is relatively new considering that formal
studies in the application of social media to emergency management
began after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 [95,67,75,80,86]. Data mining
tools and techniques have been developed such as keyword extraction
and trend analysis [37,56,59,88]. Social science models and theories to
simulate social dynamics have been proposed [115,43]. Nevertheless,
the research in these domains seems to have been conducted in-
dependently of each other.
Addressing the challenges introduced by social media applications
will expand the set of tools that emergency managers can utilize. The
next section elaborates on proposed directions to address the challenges
identified.
5. Research agenda
In order to address the challenges presented, this section provides a
research agenda for practitioners and researchers regarding the appli-
cation of social media to disaster response. To develop the research
agenda, we utilized all articles approved for further detail as described
S. Luna, M.J. Pennock
in Section 2. Then, we employed the grounded theory approach to
cluster groups of social media issues in emergency management [39].
Inductive coding enabled the emergence of issues or challenges that are
still needed to be addressed in emergency management. The key topics
that emerged were interoperability issues, stakeholder universality,
user demographics, lack of standards and regulations, extraction of
useful information, and social media monetization.
Based on that analysis, we have identified the following questions
that require additional investigation by the emergency management
research community. Our research agenda is driven by the challenges
identified by Luna and Pennock [65]. We expect that the expertise of
multiple disciplines including the social sciences, data mining, in-
formation technology, political science, communications, public affairs,
and engineering will be required to make progress against this agenda.
5.1. Interoperability
How should one filter or signal alerts that attract an emergency
manager's attention as an event unfolds?
• How does unstructured data influence the detection of mis-
information in social media applications during the phases of
emergency management?
• How can social media data be employed to anticipate and visualize
cascading network effects during disaster scenarios?
Information disseminated via social networks may contain rumors,
false, or truthful but outdated information. Emergency managers may
benefit from a rumor detection mechanism that allows them to identify
false information. By informing the public about circulating rumors,
emergency managers may prevent counterproductive consequences. In
addition, visualization of what-if scenarios may assist decision makers
when developing response strategies, which will improve community
resilience. Proposed approaches to detect misinformation rely on su-
pervised and semi-supervised learning algorithms and sensor fusion
techniques to classify sarcasm [114,116,57]. Two trends in sarcasm
detection include: first, the discovery of sarcastic patterns and the use of
those patterns as features and second, the use of contextual information
for sarcasm detection [49]. Open challenges in sarcasm detection in-
clude issues with annotation such as the use of # to describe sarcasm
(i.e. #not: “I love my job #not") and how to improve accuracy if an-
notations are not included or are deleted during pre-processing stages.
Also, issues with sentiment as a feature include providing or ranking
different polarity values to words which is reflected in the sentiment
output.
5.2. Stakeholder universality
To what extent can social media data facilitate the detection of
malicious social media profiles?
• What properties of social media profiles support the authentication
of user-generated profiles?
Individuals or organizations with malicious intentions may take
advantage of fictitious profiles to disseminate incorrect information or
infiltrate into proprietary databases. The objective of the above ques-
tions is to understand to what level fake social media profiles can be
detected. Domains including marketing and politics have been affected
by “internet-bots”, malicious software that performs the automated task
of creating a vast number of false profiles with the goal to influence
consumers or voters [51,82]. Early detection of malicious or false
profiles will enable emergency managers to detect false assistance re-
quests or mitigate false information during all four-phases of emergency
management. Current approaches to bot detection rely on techniques
similar to the detection of internet spam. Supervised learning
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International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 28 (2018) 565–577
algorithms are a common technique used to address this issue [46]. A
remaining challenge is that of filtering spammers rather than filtering
spam itself. Spammers or malicious users learn and adapt their spam-
ming strategies, thus filtering techniques must also account for
spammer behavior [8].
5.3. User demographics
How are social media applications used by different demographic
groups during emergency situations?
• Does age influence the use and decision making during disasters as
the literature in social sciences state?
• How does community structure influence the decision-making pro-
cess during emergency situations?
Different socioeconomic groups may exhibit differences in access to
and use of social media during a disaster. Understanding the differences
in how stakeholders use social media applications during disaster
events will facilitate the development of tailored preparedness, miti-
gation, response and recovery activities as well as applications that
consider a wide range of scenarios. Social science models and theories
to simulate social dynamics have been proposed [115,43]. However,
future studies should include social media use demographics along with
social dynamic models to generate more comprehensive simulation
scenarios.
5.4. Regulatory frameworks
Governance frameworks for social media management are limited
when suggesting how to manage human and technical resources in
emergency management. Therefore, the logical questions to ask would
be:
• What are the policies, standards, guidelines and procedures that
would facilitate the implementation and management of social
media applications during the four phases of emergency manage-
ment?
• What resources are needed to store the information generated?
• What is the cost for maintaining the system in operation?
• Who will have access to the information obtained?
• Where will it be stored and for how long?
Official use of social media applications has been limited due to the
scarce regulatory frameworks developed or accepted by response or-
ganizations [26]. Answers to these questions will enable the creation of
standards, policies and regulations that facilitate the governance of
social media applications before, during, and after emergency situa-
tions.
5.5. Extracting useful information from social media data
How do you extract actionable knowledge from extremely large
volumes of social media data?
• What human and capital resources are needed to store, manipulate,
and analyze social media data during disaster events?
Knowledge extraction from social media is challenging because of
the unstructured nature of the data. Text including sarcasm, gramma-
tical errors, special characters, and emoji's makes the analysis even
more challenging. Development of text analysis tools able to extract
relevant and accurate information will reduce the burden on decision
makers and speed up the decision-making process [26]. Text mining
techniques including topic discovery, cluster analysis, keyword ex-
traction, trend analysis, and classification methods have been proposed
S. Luna, M.J. Pennock
[37,56,59,88]. Nevertheless, images are also disseminated through so-
cial media, and methods to process and analyze multimedia in social
media should be formulated [114]
5.6. Social media monetization
How is public engagement affected by social media monetization in
emergency situations?
• To what extent may social media providers introduce advertising in
their platforms before users abandon them?
The business model that a social media application employs may be
proportional to their market penetration. For instance, free or freemium
models are intended to gain a vast number of users at first sight. The
concern lies when those social media applications transition to a
membership-type business model. Users tend to abandon applications
as they transition from one economic model to another. Analysis of the
impacts of different business models as well as their potential transition
should be considered by decision makers when developing a dedicated
social media tool for emergency management. In regard to monetizing
social media, literature reflects on how to make profit during emer-
gency situations. For instance, Shanley, et al. [92] discussed the pos-
sibility to license map data for profit. Luna and Pennock [65] suggest
evaluating business models in emergency management. Social media
monetization in emergency management is an underdeveloped topic,
and literature is scarce. Future research should include the effects of
advertising on user abandonment during disaster scenarios.
Answers to the above questions aim to define the requirements to
operate social media applications during emergency events. The solu-
tions will also improve coordination and interoperability among sta-
keholders and technology by identifying broken information links.
6. Conclusions
Social media is a pervasive communication channel that allows
users to create, consume and exchange content. Lessons learned from
historical disasters have shown that social media has the potential to
support the emergency management domain by providing: stakeholders
with information as the event unfolds, a mechanism to alert larger
audiences in less time, a platform to monitor public activities, as well as
a tool where stakeholders can coordinate activities.
However, substantial research challenges remain. Results from a
literature review revealed two major areas where additional work is
required. The first area consists of social challenges, which are char-
acterized by interactions among stakeholders. Understanding the re-
lationships among user responses to social media content, quality of
disseminated information, and user demographics is still an incipient
field. The second area refers to the technical challenges, which are
those related to governing the physical and logistical resources required
to support the functioning and maintenance of social media applica-
tions. Underdeveloped areas in managing social media include the de-
velopment of regulations, definition of system ownership and man-
agement, social media monetization, and management of social media
data.
Finally, we proposed a research agenda for the emergency man-
agement research community that seeks to address a set of unexplored
facets of social media in emergency management. Progress on this
agenda will create a foundation for the development of better methods,
tools and processes which will reduce the burden on decision makers
and emergency managers, improve strategies to leverage social media
content for disaster response, and facilitate coordination among sta-
keholders as a disaster unfolds.
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International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 28 (2018) 565–577
Acknowledgements
This material is based upon work supported, in part, by an
Innovation and Entrepreneurship Fellowship from the Stevens Institute
of Technology. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or re-
commendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and
do not necessarily reflect the views of the Stevens Institute of
Technology.
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