Google's Social Search & Why YOU Should Care

Today Google announced on their blog major updates to their Social Search technology. This update will rank posts and links shared by people in your social circle on Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, and Quora higher in your search results when you are searching for a related topic. For example, if a friend or connection on Twitter shares a link to a a local hotspot or has created a review of a of that hotspot in Google Hotpot, you will see that link and/or review will show up when you search for that hotspot or related term.

So, why is this relevant to the public safety community? It provides even more reason for public safety agencies to engage in social media. Studies have shown that people turn to the internet more and more for relevant information in an emergency and Google continues to dominate the search engine market and is the "home page" for a large number of individuals. If your agency has engaged in social media and updates it regularly with relevant information during an emergency than your posts to those social media sources will likely be served to any citizen that is socially connected to your agency and searching for related information on Google.

To put this in a little more perspective, a Tornado Warning has been issued for your area and spotters report that a tornado is on the ground. Your agency posts to Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, and other social spaces that a tornado is approaching Main Street and the nearest shelter in the area is located at the Elementary School and provides a link to the National Weather Service's Tornado Warning. Hearing that a tornado is in the area, an employee at your local hardware store goes to her computer and searches for the word "Tornado". Do to Google's ranking of relevance, based on social circles and location, the hardware store employee sees the link to the National Weather Service's warning along with your comments regarding shelter locations. The employee makes the decision to close the store and direct all other employees and customers to the shelter.

UPDATE: A short video provided by Google on Social Search:

A case for Twitter Fast Follow

More emergency management organizations are beginning to engage in social media every day.  By leveraging services such as Twitter and Facebook organizations are able to reach entirely new demographics with both emergency information and preparedness messages. A very large portion of our society is actively engaged in one or more of these networks.

As emergency managers we are very accustomed to carrying our Blackberry or other assigned smartphone with us 24/7/365. We are also used to regularly seeing 12 year olds updating Facebook on their iPhones at grocery store checkout lines. Everyone has a smart phone these days, right? Not so fast... As FoxNews reports, market surveys from last year show that 73% of all cell phone sales in the United States were "Feature Phones". Feature Phones, also now referred to as "dumb phones", do not support applications or true web browsing.  Users of these phones do not have access to data plans, Twitter, or Facebook.

So if we are utilizing social media platforms as a primary distribution method of our agency's content how do we reach this 73% of the cell phone carrying public?  The answer comes to us directly from Twitter.  In the summer of 2010 Twitter began to offer a service called "Fast Follow" that allows an individual to send a text message to a short message code and receive your messages as text messages on their handset. There is nothing required of your agency in order to support this service however it would be highly beneficial to ensure that you market the service on your agency's website and any printed outreach materials.

In order for an individual to subscribe to your agency's Twitter stream via Fast Follow they simply need to send a text message to "40404" with "Follow @AgencyTwitterAcct". The end result is a free text notification platform that can be utilized to augment traditional social media followers and/or provide a free stand-in for a full featured emergency notification system for jurisdictions that do not have the funding to procure such a system. The Arizona Division of Emergency Management has done an excellent job of marketing Fast Follow as a way to reach those without smart phones and/or without Twitter accounts. Realizing that people that would likely subscribe using the Fast Follow feature may not have unlimited text messaging as part of their cellular plans, Arizona actually has created a separate Twitter account just for their more significant tweets to be passed to Fast Follow users. I commend Arizona for leading the way in the marketing of this feature and highly encourage all other agencies to also incorporate it into their outreach efforts.

Emergency Notification System Considerations - Part 3

An emergency notification system that is deployed with a primary mission of providing notifications to the public has significantly more considerations in system selection than a system geared toward internal notifications.  There are several reasons for this but the single most significant is that we must consider two types of messages that will be delivered - those for routine emergencies as well as those for critical events that require immediate action to protect life and property.

Routine Emergency Notifications
We can think of routine emergencies as those that occur daily or weekly that we would like to make the public aware of.  This may include a major road closure, significant weather event, boil water notice, or even a notification that siren systems will be tested.  For these systems we must determine what the most effective method both by penetration and cost to disseminate our message will be. Similar to an internal notification system, we will want to consider the following notification mediums as primary distribution channels:

• SMS (Text Message)
• Email
• Pager
• Telephone

Most notification systems that are available in the mainstream market provide these distribution channels and the public has generally come to expect that level of availability within an opt-in system.  In addition to this basic feature set, I highly recommend that organizations also consider a system capable of delivering messages via fax.  Many businesses and new media desks may be very interested in receiving notifications from your organization however it is quite likely that the most efficient method to reach them may be by a traditional fax machine.  Your notification system should also be capable of publishing your messages to your organization's website as well as to social media accounts such as Twitter and Facebook.  These additional distribution channels can substantively increase both the reach and relevance of your message.

Critical Event Notifications
Notifying the public of a critical event that requires them to take immediate protective action calls for activation of the Emergency Alert System (EAS).  Because of this you will want to ensure that any system utilized for delivering these messages is capable of triggering EAS.  Unfortunately, very few notification systems provide for the direct - end to end - connection to broadcasters.

Although I generally attempt to avoid direct vendor mentions, one vendor that does provide such a system, including the interconnecting infrastructure, is Communications Laboratories' EMnet system. This package places equipment at each activation point as well as each broadcaster and connectivity is achieved using internet as well as satellite links between each point. It is important to note however that while this system does an excellent job at activating EAS, it does not provide for the other distribution channels that we have addressed above.

The advent of the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System (IPAWS) does however offer a mechanism and infrastructure for many notification systems to trigger an EAS activation. Utilizing the internet, a notification system can push a message formated in the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) to federally maintained servers that will then redistribute the message to broadcasters and select other partners. The IPAWS program is still under development at this point however a timeline has been established by the FCC to require broadcasters to obtain equipment capable of receiving messages from the IPAWS server.

Content Targeting
Depending on the size of the jurisdiction, some thought should be given to ensuring that your system allows you to target alerts to specific geographic areas potentially as small as the neighborhood level.  You will also almost certainly want to design the system to allow your citizens to opt-in to receiving specific types of information. A resident may wish to receive notifications about severe weather and school closings but not about road conditions. Designing your system in this manner helps ensure that your content will be relevant to those receiving it.

A Holistic Approach
Since very few vendors offer a single product that does everything well, a comprehensive public warning program may require the use of multiple products potentially from multiple vendors. For example, desiring a very robust and redundant EAS program, a jurisdiction may select a product such as EMnet that performs that function very well and also procure a product that specializes in delivering notification by email, SMS, and other electronic means. They may utilize the output of one of these systems to update their website and publish their message to social media. Such an operational concept can be achieved, through effective system integration, in a single operation performed by the user and will be the topic of our final post in this series.

Google Real-Time Search for Situational Awareness

There has been much discussion recently regarding the use of Social Media as a situational awareness tool for public safety organizations. A frequent comment heard from public safety officials when faced with the idea of using this tool is how they can possibly sort through the massive amount of information available on social media and where they should even begin. While attending a presentation today on the topic of social media in emergency management this topic came to the surface and I felt compelled to offer a short story to the group as well as a potential solution.

In late 2009 Google launched a new search feature that is specifically designed to provide the most recent information on the internet regarding the search terms that you provide. Google Real-Time search provides results from traditional news sources and blogs as well as social content from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social networks. To get an idea of how this can work, go to http://www.google.com/realtime and search for a current event. Emergency Managers may utilize this service without the need for having any accounts on social networks and can see the search results even if their organization blocks direct access to social media on their network.

While certainly not an all inclusive solution for extrapolating situational awareness data from social sources, if you spend a little time experimenting with Google Real-Time Search during unfolding events, you may find it to be a gateway drug in the concept of social data mining. In future posts we will also examine additional tools that are available to emergency managers to harvest, validate, and curate social data.

Emergency Notification System Considerations - Part 2

Yesterday we took a very broad look at things to consider when selecting an emergency notification system for an organization.  Today I would like to focus on specific things that should be considered if your system will emphasize providing notifications internally within your organization and to your response partners. There are several reasons that we may want and/or need a system to do such:

• Provide Situational Awareness of emerging or ongoing events in order to maintain a Common Operating Picture and ensure response readiness as a situation escalates.
• Inform staff of operational closings and/or the need to report to an alternate work site as part of a Continuity of Operations Plan.
• Request staff and response partners to respond to an EOC, incident site, or staging location.

Capturing Response Data
One of the first things what we must consider with this type of system is the ability that it has to capture information from the message recipient.  In each of these notification examples we likely wish to have the ability to confirm that the message was actually received by the recipient as well as potentially additional information regarding their ability to respond.  The key here is that we will want to leverage the technology to capture this information on our behalf either through eliciting a text based response to the the message or through the utilization of a touch tone response to a phone call.

The system should be flexible enough to allow the individual initiating the message to create a layer of responses. For example, a message notifying staff and response partners that an EOC is activating may with to elicit if the individual is available for duty as well as determining their Estimated Time of Arrival to the EOC. Capturing this data electronically should allow the individual responsible for making the notification to know if they will have any staffing shortages as well as how long they can expect it to take for the EOC to be fully operational.

Recognizing Positions
If your system will be utilized to activate an EOC or specialty response team, it can be very useful for the system to recognize individuals as filling positions. That is to say that perhaps your jurisdiction's HAZMAT team has three medical specialists but only one is needed for an emergency. If your system recognizes positions, it can provide an activation message requesting the primary medical specialist to respond and a message to your "backup" medical specialists that the team is being deployed however their response is not required. In the event that the system was unable to confirm that the "primary" medical specialist was available to respond it would automatically request that the next qualified individual to fill that position make their response. Use of positions in this was can greatly reduce the amount of human intervention required to activate resources.

Notification Mediums
Any notification system must be capable of utilizing the maximum number of distribution mediums possible. At a MINIMUM a system procured for internal and partner notification should include the following distribution methods:

• Email
• SMS (Text Messaging)
• Voice (Telephone)

There are a few questions to ask a vendor when evaluating their notification products for these basic notification channels. Distribution of mass messages to email servers and cell phone provider's SMS gateways routinely causes these providers to identify emergency notification messages as spam and either block or throttle the dissemination of messages. It is critical that the vendor have a working relationship with key email providers and gateways to ensure that their servers remain on "white lists" that identify notification messages as not being spam. The same is true of SMS (Text) messages however arguably even more critical. The vendor must maintain close partnerships with cellular providers to ensure that their messages are not blocked or throttled by the SMS gateway that receives the message to pass it to the cellular towers for delivery. Ideally, the vendor will have dedicated delivery paths to cellular providers that bypass standard SMS gateways and provide priority routing for emergency messages.

In addition to the basic delivery methods of email, SMS, and voice a jurisdiction should consider soliciting the following options for message delivery:

• Desktop (Computer pop-up) notifications
• Pager (SNPP) delivery
• Blackberry PIN delivery
• Fax delivery
• LED Sign Board triggering
• Public Address System activation

Although each of these additional options have a specific role that they fill, one or all of them may be appropriate for many jurisdictions. A notification system that will be used to notify an office building of the need to evacuate and/or initiate a Continuity of Operations Plan could highly benefit from desktop notifications as well as LED sign board and public address system activation.  A hospital that still utilizes alpha-numeric pagers for its staff would certainly want to ensure that their system provides direct access to the paging vendor's SNPP gateway. Finally, although ofter overlooked in our digital age, a notification system used to alert various other offices may benefit from the ability to deliver a message by fax.

Location & Discipline
If a system will be utilized to provide situational awareness of events, particularly if the audience is large, a significant emphasis should be placed on the ability of the system to target alerts based on geographic preference as well as the type of event or discipline of the recipient. Imagine the amount of information pushed by a system used to provide situational awareness for an entire state. An official responsible for one end of the state almost certainly has little interest in minor events unfolding at the opposite end of the state. The same is true in that a fire chief likely has little interest in a relatively minor public works issue. Ideally in this situation your system will permit recipients to select what information is relevant to them both on a geographic basis as well as the type of event.

Message Creation
If your system includes a telephone notification component, you will want to examine the method that is utilized to create the voice message.  While some jurisdictions are comfortable with the text-to-speech capability that some systems offer, others may find that they either experience pronunciation problems or that their audience quickly disconnects from the automated message with the assumption that it is associated with telemarketing or collections activities. Most systems provide the ability to record your own voice message during activation. This can be achieved either through dialing a special telephone number for the vendor and the system recording your message via telephone, recording your message through a computer and uploading it to the system, or through a direct recording interface within the notification platforms activation screen. If sound quality and activation time are critical to your notification program it is highly advantageous to be able to record your message directly into the application. With that said, the ability to also be able to record a message via telephone provides greater flexibility to activate the system from virtually any location.

Interoperability
Although we will explore the issue of interoperability more fully when we discuss system integration, it is important to note that any system used for internal and stakeholder notification must support interoperability with other systems. This will allow officials that receive notifications from your system to also be alerted to situations that are highly relevant to them but issued via the notification system of a neighboring jurisdiction, another department within the jurisdiction, or aggregated from a partner such as the National Weather Service. There are a few ways to achieve this functionality. A vendor may either provide their own internal support for interoperability as is the case with Cooper Notification's Roam Secure Alert Network RSIX platform and/or through integration with the federal IPAWS aggrigator program.

Redundancy
The very nature of an emergency notification system requires it to be survivable.  As a result it is critical that the system that we implement must be deployed to ensure the highest level of redundancy possible. If our system is managed in-house (the hardware is physically under the control of your own staff) we should seek a contract with the vendor to provide a back-up server that is synchronized in real-time with our primary in-house server but located off-site and under the control of the vendor. Likewise, if we select an option that is entirely hosted by the vendor, we should ensure that we receive specific information regarding the level of redundancy and diversity of their data centers. We should ensure that the data-centers utilized by the vendor are as robust and hardened as possible and that any redundant servers provided are housed at a separate data-center from the primary server. Ideally, if the primary hosted data-center is located on the East Coast the back-up data-center would be hosted on the West Coast.


In our next post in this series we will examine considerations for system used to warn the public.
Part 3

The 911 system we have in place works: Breaking Social Barriers

This morning I became aware via a tweet from Social Media in Emergency Management advocate Kim Stephens of an ongoing effort by Southold Voice, inc, a New York property owners organization, that is attempting to convince their town leaders to engage in social media for disaster preparedness and response.  The organization has several posts on their website pleading with town officials to accept the concept that Social Media could be beneficial toward comprehensive emergency management efforts. While it is refreshing to see a community organization take such an approach to engaging elected and appointed officials, the individuals behind this effort have also reached out to emergency management practitioners throughout the country using Twitter to help build their arsenal of material to utilize when educating their local officials.

In addition to the approach that this organization is using to engage their town, I was struck most by a quote that was contained within an article written about these efforts. In the article, the town's Police Captain is quoted:

“The 911 system we have in place works,” Flatley said. Flatley said he was not sure the additional work involved in using social media in emergency weather situations was worth it or not. Flately noted he has increased his efforts to notify news media of road closings, down trees and accidents during severe storms this winter.

The reason that this quote struck me is that it clearly shows that many emergency managers and public safety officials  still do not understand the value that social media can bring to the table to facilitate communication with their community or even what that communication may look like.  Based solely on the above captioned quote, the Town of Southold's Police Department views inbound communication as a job for their Public Safety Answering Point via 911 and outbound communication as the job of the news media.  There are two key myths in this belief. As I have previously written about, utilizing multiple mediums to provide information to the masses is critical.  Every study that has been released over the last several years shows that people spend more time engaged in digital media, either utilizing a computer or smart phone, than they do monitoring traditional broadcast media.  With that understanding in place, we must challenge the myth that the traditional broadcast industry is capable of effectively reaching a majority of out population.  Similarly, while most urban jurisdictions are utilizing a combination of public outreach campaigns and non-emergency call centers to decrease the load on their Public Safety Answering Points and 911 trunks, this quote shows us that there are still some areas that feel that 911 could or should be utilized for citizen feedback.

A few simple lessons for jurisdictions faced with similar challenges:

• People spend more time online than they do monitoring traditional news sources.
• Facebook and other Social Media outlets are where people spend most of their time online.
• It is important to know the true reach of your public warning program. If you are faxing press releases to the news media and posting a banner to your website, you aren't reaching most of your citizens.
• Using appropriate and free tools a jurisdiction can provide updates to its website and multiple social media networks simultaneously with no additional workload required by staff.
• It is better to push information via social media rather than ignore it all together because you fear you do not have the resources to effectively monitor all social streams. One way engagement is better than no engagement.
• It is better to provide minimal resources to allow staff such as public safety dispatchers and/or public information officers to monitor and engage on select social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to answer questions from the public rather than to ever advocate that 911 be utilized for this purpose. When faced with a true crisis, your resources will be much better applied.

Considerations for selecting an emergency notification system

Many organizations either have or are considering investing in emergency notification systems.  Anyone that has researched available vendors and products in this arena knows that the options available with these systems varies widely.  What is shocking however is that many invest in such systems without having a clear understanding of what they are purchasing or even what it is that they really need.  As such, let's take a moment to consider what we should look for in such a system.

When considering an emergency notification system the first question that we must ask ourselves is what our intended audience is.  An organization may utilize such a system to:

•  Inform its employees and/or partners that an emergency exists
• Provide situational awareness of an emergency situation to leadership and external stakeholders 
• Request that employees and stakeholders take a specific action such as reporting to an Emergency Operations Center or alternate working location
• Provide situational awareness to the public of an emergency situation
• Notify the public of life threatening emergency that requires immediate protective actions.

Identifying what our intended audience and goal is will help us determine what feature sets we should solicit as part of our procurement process.  Some of these features will include the ability to confirm a recipient has received the message and/or has the ability to comply with a requested action, what methods such as telephone / email / text message / fax are available to distributing the message, what criteria such as event type or geographic area may be used to determine recipients of the message, how the database of recipients is maintained, options for interoperability with neighboring alert systems, the ability to integrate with other alert system platforms, and the ability to both activate and be triggered by the Emergency Alert System.

It is important to remember that we need our staff to be intimately familiar with a system that they will utilize during the most severe crisis and as such, if at all possible, we should select a system that will fill our needs during not only such a major crisis but also during day to day operations. This requires both technical planning in the procurement processes as well as operational planning considerations of how we do business.

In follow-up articles we will examine important feature sets to consider for systems to communicate internally within our organization, systems to communicate externally with the public, and finally considerations for integrating multiple notification systems into a comprehensive warning program that may include the Emergency Alert System and Social Media components.

Continue Reading: Part 2