Emergency Twitters – Cont'd.

This is the next in a series of occasional articles about how some fire and rescue departments are using Twitter to enhance their operations.  To read previous articles, click on the Twitter category in the right sidebar.

Today’s topic covers how an emergency management agency used the Twitter-related program TweetGrid to help manage an information flow during a major event.  First, let’s get introduced to TweetGrid.

TweetGrid is a method to monitor several Twitter categories simultaneously.  You can set up a page of columns each dedicated to a specific topic or category that you want to follow in live-time.  Start by going to the website http://tweetgrid.com/ and opening it up.  You will get a homepage that looks like this:

Take a few minutes to explore the How To and FAQ pages along with the Search.  The How To has several video tutorials to get you learn how to operate it.  You get your choice of how many columns you want to create and how they will be laid out.

As a sample I set up a 3-column X 1-deep page and picked out three topics to follow, fire, plane and ambulance.  I picked “plane” because this is the day of the Amsterdam plane crash.

What makes this so different from following Tweets on your own Twitter page is that with TweetGrid you follow ALL Twitter pages in the universe that are posted with your key words or hash tags that you can also enter.  This is a very dynamic page, as you’ll see when you try it out.

A “plus” for TweetGrid is that you DO NOT need to have a Twitter account to use it.  So anybody can set one up anywhere, anytime, on any computer.

A good example of how it can be used in emergency operations was utilized last month at the Presidential Inauguration in Washington, D. C., a Maryland state agency set up an operations center to monitor all traffic and emergency situations.  One of their operators kindly wrote out for Firegeezer what they did:

We activated a departmental operations center during the Presidential Inauguration and monitored a lot of traditional media outlets, such as cable news networks, local coverage, and our own public safety radio systems. This also included WebEOC, the Capital Region’s standard program for online incident management. 

But we also monitored nontraditional media sources using Google Alerts (looking for keywords that would impact our agency’s ability to provide service) and Twitter. Specifically, we used a program called TweetGrid, which allows users to comb through Twitter feeds on a real-time basis, searching for specific events or topics. We tracked a number of search phrases having to do with the inauguration.

While most of it was chatter, there were a couple notable success stories. Most memorable was the incident where a woman fell into the subway tracks during the crush of Inauguration commuters. While most other agencies knew about the incident within fifteen minutes, we were tracking the right Twitter search phrases and literally found out within seconds. 

Fortunately, the inauguration went very well, and we had no major incidents to test out our reliance on TweetGrid. But it was invaluable in determining crowd movements, the mood of people on the ground, and gaining a holistic situational awareness that we never could have had in the past.