Social Media Monitoring and the Democratic National Convention: New Tasks and Emergent Processes

Sutton Jeannette N.
Additional contact information
Sutton Jeannette N.: University of Colorado at Boulder

Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, 2009, vol. 6, issue 1, 22

Abstract: Public information officers and FEMA external affairs personnel routinely monitor online media reports in times of crises and disaster events. Online news sources now include citizen driven social media such as blogs, i-reports, photo and video sharing and networked information and communication technologies such as Facebook, MySpace, and the microblogging network, Twitter. While these communication mechanisms are increasing, little is known about the attention public officials devote to accessing, monitoring, and addressing public communication through social media. Utilizing data gathered through observations, interviews, and document analysis, this study concentrates on the new task of social media monitoring and the emergent processes used by public officials during the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Although some strategies were developed to monitor and utilize social media, there was a tendency to fall back upon standard operating procedures, limiting the emergence of new processes. Recommendations are provided for media monitoring activities in future crisis and disaster response.

Keywords: disaster; media monitoring; social media; emergent phenomena (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1547-7355.1601 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:johsem:v:6:y:2009:i:1:p:22:n:56

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/jhsem/html

DOI: 10.2202/1547-7355.1601

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management is currently edited by Irmak Renda-Tanali

More articles in Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().