 Today I'm going to talk about social media and emergency management. We're going to talk about the strategy and the thinking behind it and also I'm going to go into the details about how we've tried to implement it in the State Control Centre and the real practical lessons that we've learned and the challenges that we've faced doing that. I've identified three main change in mindsets when it comes to using social media effectively and I think it applies more broadly than social media as well. The first change is the mindsets that have happened in this organization since Black Saturday and the Royal Commission and so on. So we'll go through some of those. So previously I think our attitude was that we held the information the community needed and that we expected them to come to us to get that information, to come to the CFA website, the other agency websites and get that information. So the move into social media is very much a move towards we'll come to you. We'll take the information to where the community is which is on Facebook and Twitter and on mobile devices. And I mean this applies not just in social media programs like the Home Bushfire Assessment. It's a good example of us taking our information, taking our services to people at their home rather than expecting them to come to us. Change of mindset number two. I think in the past we've had the attitude that we are the people that should decide what the community needs and they should be grateful for it whatever we decide that we want to give them. I think that's very much changed now to us, very much more concerned about what the community tells us they want and what they need and we provide that to them. There's also a big argument for sometimes just releasing information and we may not know exactly what the community might do with it but if you make that data available and make that information available then that encourages innovation and people come up with new ways of using that that can benefit everybody. The best example of that is plan burns. There's been a big debate about whether or not plan burns should be displayed on the same map as emergency incidents. Now obviously with any agencies with very specific views about what plan burns are and what emergency incidents are but from a community point of view, if a person sees smoke they want to go to the website and find out information about it whether that's coming from a plan burn or an emergency incident really doesn't make a lot of difference to the community. So there's been a lot of great work done by the information operations team and the IT guys to actually get the plan burn data available and hopefully very soon all that information will be available on the same map. So that's a really good step forward. Change of mindset number three. The public is a resource, not a liability. So again we often take the attitude that we're the experts and we need to tell the community what to do and that creates a very passive community who sit and wait to be told what to do and that's one of the things that we don't want the community to do. We want them to take initiative and be educated and make decisions for themselves. So that's an app from the San Ramon Folly Fire Department in the United States. It was created after the fire chief was out for a meal at a restaurant and he was enjoying the meal when a couple of his fire trucks pulled up the front he would like to see what was happening and somebody in the restaurant next door had a heart attack and it actually died before the fire officers were able to get there and use the defibrillator machine to do CPR. So this app tells people if there's an incident nearby them it tells them where the nearest defibrillator machine is and that's obviously empowering the community to actually help in that scenario. It's that concept of the community being the first responder rather than us. We all see ourselves as the first responders but generally there's community on scene and so the community are the first people responding to the emergency before the emergency services get there. This is Craig Fugate who's the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the United States talking about that same concept. We deal with this kind of this hypothesis and that is the public's not a liability to their resource and that oftentimes it's in their own nature to try to share information and they now have tools they never had before and they're doing it every day. They're doing it just for their routine how they communicate with friends and families but also during a crisis and we're seeing this more and more for the other you that do the hashtag stuff try following this hashtag SMEM social media and emergency management and really starting to see how local and state emergency managers are looking at tools like Twitter and Facebook not so much as a broadcast tool but really looking at how people are moving information around and how to incorporate that into their tools. The public oftentimes has better information and situational awareness in an area of a disaster than any of the teams in response that are coming from the outside but we kind of have this barrier because the public is an official it's not an official source of information the other thing is we're not really sure how to do this because we've got a lot of phobias about privacy and how we interact with the public and all of this stuff but we've seen now in the U.S. from wildfires in California and Boulder to the recent ice storm and snow storms the public is putting out better situational awareness than many of our own agencies can with our official data sets So what we've been doing at CFA and in Victoria 2008 we set up our Facebook page I think it was 2007 we first got into YouTube so it's quite early on considering those platforms that have been going for a few years at that stage but it was very much in the prevention and preparedness phase of emergencies we weren't getting involved in the response and warnings or anything like that it was the community education total firebands, fire danger readings that sort of information that we were providing to people on social media but last year there was very much a move towards response and getting social media integrated within the response phase Why did we do that? Basically the speed and the rates that social media gives you the two most basic reasons obviously you can reach a lot of people very quickly and those people can be journalists who then rebroadcast that over more traditional mediums as well so everyone benefits from that speed not just people on social media quite light-hearted look at it but technically it's true you could easily get a message from one side of America to the other before the earthquake arrived What reasons why we do it? Obviously the bushfire as well commission the focus on community education and warnings after that so we're looking at new ways of getting information and warnings to people and I think the attitude has been we need to look at new ways of doing it it's not just a matter of trying to do more of what we did before or trying to do what we did before better but really trying to look at new ways of getting warnings to people and also the Victorian Fludge Review specifically addressed the need to use social media for warnings and also interestingly looking at social media as a source of information to and from the public so I think a couple of years ago people were using social media to push information out to people but really now we're in the space of looking at using it to push information out to people but also how do we get information in from people so that intelligence gathering which has been recognized at the highest levels there's a comment that we had on our Facebook page another good reason why we do it is that for Sarah it's the only way she can get warning information, she hasn't got radio reception she doesn't have a connection to the internet and that's because often people don't have credit on their phones to access the internet on their phones but they do have a free with their mobile package they have a free access to Facebook so Facebook is probably the only contact with the internet that they have and also the generational argument that a lot of younger people rely very much more on online news sources than the traditional media so the big step forward I suppose last year was the integration of social media into OneSourceOneMessage for those of you who don't know OneSourceOneMessage is the system that our information officers use to get warnings out from incident control centers around the state they get messages out to various different mediums so as soon as they put the message into the system it goes on to the website it goes out to the media, traditional media it goes on to the RSS feed various other mediums and what we did last year was get that integrated get social media integrated to that so as soon as a warning is issued 24 hours a day, 7 days a week they'll automatically go on to Facebook and our Twitter accounts and then that's complemented by manual updates from our media units so that's the sort of information that the media are inquiring about how many trucks and just more information about what's happening with the incident here's an example of that so this one the one at the top there is a manual tweet by our media unit promoting the township protection plans that are available for the areas that are currently involved in the fires the thinking behind that is that you have people's attention while the fires are happening so it's a good time to promote the township protection plans even though you'd hope people were looking at them before the fire happens and then the next two are the automatic posts from awesome and then the fourth one, another manual tweet from our media officers and this is just an example of the same thing on Facebook where you've got the automatic warning at the top and then at 40, 30, 39 minutes later we've got a manual tweet from the media team saying that the fire is now under control and a manual post to the Facebook page so that's how we do it year round as it were in CFA managed by the awesome information operations team and the on-call media people the 24-7 media coverage that we provide manages those accounts when it comes to the state control centre obviously a bit more complicated more agencies involved generally much busier times when there's major incidents happening so we needed to really look at how we would manage this on a multi-agency, multi-hazard basis so what we did was bring a paper to the strategic fire and flood forum which consists of the fire services commissioner and all the chiefs of all the different agencies to propose the establishment of two new roles in the state control centre first one being media officers, social media sitting with the media management unit and the social media monitor sitting with the public information section and the community warnings and advice officer there's three principles in that paper which were supported by the fire services commissioner and the chiefs one that obviously we agree and believe that the use of social media helps us achieve our core mission that we need to engage with people year round in social media and build up that credibility and trust to just suddenly try and engage with people when there's an emergency happening that's really too late you need to have built up that credibility and trust so people know where to find you and believe what you're saying and acceptance that agencies have a role to play in this there was an argument that this is too difficult for it's not our area of expertise and the emergency services social media so we should stay out of it and leave that to traditional media and we'll just use our traditional mediums to get information to the traditional media and then let them worry about social media but really that's the situation you'd be in and then we'd be that you'd be engaging with people in the preparation and planning phases and then suddenly disappear during response and then return for recovery again which just doesn't make any sense the principle here as well of engaging in the exchange of timely relevant and tailored information is important which once again gets the concept of intelligence gathering and what information can we get from social media that could help us media officer social media the latest information is posted to social media so that'll be a combination as we said before of the automatic posts and the manual myth-busting and clarifying is another very crucial role obviously anyone can post whatever they want to social media rumours do start generally they're not malicious rumours they're generally well-meaning people who have heard something and repeated and then that rumours spreads very quickly because of the nature of social media there's a real need and an ability I mean it's quite easy to squash a rumour the Queensland police find it quite easy to squash rumours about dams busting and so on just by tweeting on their account or putting on their Facebook page account because they had 180,000 followers and that actually kept the traditional media in check as well if they posted something saying it was incorrect they find Sky News and other traditional media outlets that's where we're removing rumours from their websites as well and the managed expectations that's obviously when it's very busy we may not be able to answer every single question we get in social media but Peter Baker actually from F&EM used the analogy that we use for fire trucks when there's major bushfires on we are quite clear and forthright with the community that we won't get a fire truck to every house when there's major emergencies happening so in the same light we have to be open and honest to manage expectations to tell people we're not going to be able to answer every single question we get when there's major emergencies happening but we'll try and prioritise and deal with what we can deal with the challenges that we find in this role speed information for authorisation it's a common issue that isn't specific to social media I've worked at CFI for seven years doing media work during emergencies the ability to get speedy information authorised has always been an issue even before social media existed it's just that it's a lot more obvious and the spotlight's really shone on it now so that's how we can speed that up and really stay credible because if we have independent accounts independent social media accounts who have more up-to-date information than we have then we lose all credibility and why would people follow us and they can get more up-to-date stuff from other accounts challenges of resourcing finding suitably qualified people to fill that role was a bit of an issue though we were able to fill it we did some joint training exercises with DSA, SES, CFI and MFB and we have quite a pool of people from the communication side of the organisations who can fill that role and it also exposes inconsistencies and the slower mediums the best example of that I suppose is if a warning's been issued saying a fire's out of control and then that situation changes and the fire now is brought under control it can take 10 or 15 minutes to update that awesome message on the website so the dilemma we're in is do we wait 15 minutes with social media to tell people that the fire's under control and what we're doing then is holding information back from the community but if we do post it then the potential of creating contradictions between the information so people see on social media they say the fire's under control but on the website it still says it's out of control so how do we manage that so the compromise we came to was that we would issue the warning issue the updated information on social media and highlight that the information will be updated shortly on the website and then make sure that the information is updated on the website the social media monitor is an intelligence gathering role so their job is to identify monitor relevant social media to do with the whatever the emergency is to analyse and assess that information and to feed it back into the SEC structures this is probably a more challenging role the first problem was finding suitable personnel and really because really for this role you need someone who's quite experienced in emergency management who can understand the potential significance of information from an operational point of view a particular smoke pattern or cloud pattern or changing weather conditions that a member of the community might be talking about in social media you need to be able to identify well is that relevant from an operational point of view and then also someone who combines that with social media skills filtering and verifying social media information this is the common question we get asked and there's no easy answer for it everyone around the world is trying to come up with better ways of filtering and verifying information you get in social media and it can be a bit overwhelming but there are ways of doing it I mean you've got trusted sources if it's people that you know if it's our own members for example passing information on or people that you've built up a relationship with over time that you trust and that's a way of verifying it and there's also a number of research projects underway the University of Melbourne are looking at how they can filter and analyze tweets using all sorts of complicated algorithms that can filter out and get the best stuff to the top so there's no, it's a challenge but it's a challenge that everyone around the world is working on and then just the challenge of embedding a new system into the traditional state control center structures, the EM structures it'll take a bit of time just to get that embedded into the system get people trusting it so these are some examples of the benefits that we saw over the summer a good example of the myth busting someone had heard a rumor locally that the fire had started up again and we were able to confirm reasonably quickly that that wasn't the case obviously we need to be careful with that it took me 15 minutes to confirm that because you don't want to go on and say no, our information says it's not started up and then you discover that our information was wrong because that loses your credibility so I needed to be really confident that the fire hadn't started up again before I posted that the correction of errors and inconsistencies we spoke earlier about the challenges being that social media can highlight the inconsistencies and our information, not the challenge but it's also an opportunity to actually deal with that the inconsistencies between the statuses of the fires people were saying on the website it says this and here you're saying that what's actually happening so we were able to find out what was happening clear up the inconsistencies get everything consistent and post that back to social media so it allows us to fix any errors in our information very quickly that's the sort of thing that's always happened but it may have been we just may never have known about it in the past as I mentioned earlier reach beyond social media the benefit from this the queens and police again the director of media there tells the analogy of a senior citizen sheltering under her table with the wind up radio listening to the emergency information and she's actually getting her information from twitter because they're putting their information out to the journalists by twitter and they're rebroadcasting that on radio so everyone benefits from it so the challenge is at times it's been a bit like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole social media into our traditional structures and I think that basically comes from the way that we generally have worked in the past very command and control, linear, hierarchical sort of information flow and really that isn't what social media is all about social media is very much a flexible network an improvised medium so we've been trying to see how we can bridge the gap between those two ways of working our linear hierarchical way of working and social media, how do we try and make that work so we've done a lot of work in trying to understand the concerns we've had a lot of obviously discussions and debate we've had meetings with the state duty officers presentations to try and explain what it is we're doing and that there's a lot of strategy and thinking behind what we're doing because a lot of the misunderstandings a lot of the a lot of the wariness is just due to a lack of understanding or a lack of us understanding people what we're doing so as I said we've had meetings we've done up guides and procedures flexible guides and procedures that really give some foundation to what it is we're doing so that people have faith in what we are doing practical examples in case studies are always very useful the Queensland Police case studies very useful for getting people to understand the benefits and the potential of it and hopefully the work that we're doing in Victoria can provide case studies for other people to use to try and encourage their organisations to move down this path advocating on behalf of the community is really about I think I've noticed quite a bit in this sector that we can be very focused on what suits us and what we want to arrange things that fit our agencies and fit the way we work and in this area we really have to always remind ourselves take a step back and think about what is it the community wants so the example of the plan burns earlier is a good example what is it the community is expecting out of this the Fire Services Commissioner recently at a conference I was at spoke about interoperability and it's a term that we've all heard bandied around and generally we see that as meaning interoperability between agencies but the Fire Services Commissioner takes that one step further and says that we have to be interoperability has to apply to the community as well so whatever systems and whatever systems we're using have to be interoperable with the community as well so I think that's a very important thing to remember when we think about interoperability and really we you know it's all of our duties to take a step back and think about that and remove the blinkers at times and think what the community actually want out of this integrating into exercises obviously very important as well to do with embedding the processes and getting other emergency managers to understand how this will work within their systems so we were very lucky last year to through the OASC to run an exercise multi-agency exercise which did just that this exercise is the first of its type it's the first in Australia and it's going to really push some boundaries here I'm very keen to promote social media in times of emergency if we don't dominate this space others will and this has to be a very credible source of information so it's vital that it's us that are putting the messages out and we get incredible messages back from the community who trust this as a credible source of how they get information times of crisis The FireBell Pilot Training Exercise aimed to create a realistic simulation of social media this allowed staff who may be appointed to the media officer, social media and social media monitor positions to train and exercise the use of social media tools during a significant emergency situation The Pilot Training Exercise used a scenario where in a bush fire encompassed the urban fringe of Melbourne, while simultaneously a significant storm cell resulted in flash flooding in a regional city of Victoria this multi-hazard scenario ensured that staff from different organizations were involved the four hour exercise was run at the State where staff interacted with the simulation as the scenario played out over five phases with pre-planned escalating levels of online community apprehension about the events I would count myself extremely comfortable with social media but I've never doubted with this kind of volume of requests before and it's quite overwhelming I've never had to deal with multiple platforms of just everything firing at once that have come up that I never really would have thought of otherwise so it's been pretty stressful and very valuable I think it's a way of them being able to get official messages through channels that they're familiar with and it's a way of them being able to get accurate information and sort of being able to dispel the myths of people being helpful and offering advice but it not being quite right I think the trial for the social media is what all the agencies are trying to do is crucial it's one thing for us to develop ideas and regulations and response guides in a room quietly in peacetime but to actually see them practised is a huge bonus I think for us and certainly we've identified some areas that we already need to work on some of them will be significant in terms of what do we do when there's a huge volume of responses coming in, do we focus on the ones that are the most dire if there's some responses for instance that have fire in their homes already do we have to focus on those do we focus on the generalised information and how we get that out even developing the roles themselves so people know exactly what they're responsible for when they first step in that was one of the first things we identified so certainly scope for expanding it definitely see enormous value in it the critical thing was a partnership, a collaboration of all of the emergency services organisations and agencies of Victoria being all in the room at the same time because on the day is not the day to be doing this for the first time with all the people you'd be working with on the day when it happens I think it's the key thing and around getting it right the accuracy of the information becoming that trusted source of information being credible, being present out there in the social media environment as the one trusted source and being confident to be in that space that's it thanks very much again for coming