The Power of Twitter In Case of Emergency
Apparently a DDoS attack took down the social web this morning while I was running around trying to check out a new apartment. My business partner Mike Cardosa tweeted this an hour ago
@doza I got caught in an infinite loop earlier. Twitter was down & I wanted to send a tweet to tell people. #iFail
CNN is running a front page story on it and it shows how we all get used to what some have referred to as the Social OS. In case of emergency we might need to *God forbid* pick up the phone, send an email or have a face-to-face conversation to relay information between our ‘friends’.
There are times that Twitter provides news and context in an emergency situation that cannot be replicated through a phone call/email or a face-to-face conversation.
A few months ago I was traveling back to Boston on the train from NYC. It was the end of spring break and I was about to start the last sprint of my Babson MBA career. A classmate of mine was flying into Logan Airport from Japan the next day and I had volunteered to pick her up from the airport. About an hour into my journey up the Eastern Seabord I recieved a phone call from a blocked number. Like most of you, if I do not know the phone number (or if the phone number is blocked) I do not pick up the phone.
A minute later, I see that my mystery caller left a message. With a tenuous connection to the T-Mobile network in Connecicut, I checked my voicemail.
It was my friend who said (transcribed vaguely from memory)
The airport is shut down - there was an accident *static* ….wind…..*static*….. I do not know how / when I’m getting back to Boston but *static*……. Will call you *garbled transmission* End of Message.
My first instinct after getting this message was to check CNN.com on my iPhone. When nothing appeared, I jumped on MSNBC & FoxNews. I could not find any information on any traditional news network about an airline incident in Japan - not even a ‘Breaking News’ story.
I then quickly installed Skype for my iPhone and tried to see if my friend had called from Skype. Nothing.
5 minutes had elapsed since my reciept of the message. I then realized I should have looked at Twitter. I had been extolling the virtues of using Twitter to source information across multiple users about brands or events or products - but always in a post-event fashion. My mental model was accustomed to viewing ‘breaking news’ through online news organizations - but in this case I had no additional data.
I quickly browsed to search.twitter.com and entered the words ‘Japan plane crash’. I was immediately innundated with results from various indivuals the world over documenting the recent crash of a FedEx plane at Narita Airport due to strong winds. Apparently the shearing winds were so bad that Narita then closed the airport and grounded all flights.
It took me 30 seconds to get all this information by scrolling through a series of tweets.
Twitter showed its power to inform in an emergency. We have seen most recently during the Iran Election and we will probably see it countless other times during real-world large scale emergencies.
When I pulled into Boston’s Back Bay Station about an hour later I recieved a tweet from the New York Times Twitter account with a brief ‘breaking news’ summary of the crash. I then checked CNN.com from my iPhone and saw the familiar yellow header with a one line summary and ‘Developing story’ about the crash.
Twitter provided me with multiple on the ground points of information prior to traditional news outlets reporting the crash.
Twitter and Facebook thankfully seem to be back up and running with a few small hicccups and everything appears to be back to normal.
While I try an exercise caution on my dependence to social networks, I learned my lesson about the power of Twitter when combined with a little bit of traditional information.
