Social Media and Hurricane Gustav

An interesting article on Poynter Online discusses how social media is being used to help and inform people about hurricane Gustav.  The social media efforts for Gustav are being led by Andy Carvin, the senior social media strategist over at NPR.

Andy is using all sorts of social media platforms out there.  For example, he used ning to create a free information center so that people could track hurricane Gustav and get constant news updates.  Andy also create a Gustav wiki page to provide additional information and resources to victims or potential victims of the hurricane.  Andy didn’t stop at a wiki and a ning site though.  He also put together a:

Gustav wordpress blog

and

a Gustav twitter account for alerts

Kudos to Andy for doing such a tremendous job in getting information and resources out to the public.  Andy’s social media efforts have been able to draw hundreds of volunteers who are all eager to help out.  When Poynter asked Andy why it was so important for him to help out, he replied:

“It’s so easy to forget that there are large numbers of people on the Internet with certain types of expertise that can prove to be invaluable in times of crisis. When you think of typical volunteers in an emergency, it’s often people with EMS backgrounds, Red Cross volunteers and the like, but not people with technology skills. Yet many Internet-savvy people can bring things to the table, pulling together an amazing array of tools and resources that can be useful to the public in times of crisis. So I’m working with an incredible group of these online volunteers to do just that.”

great job Andy, what a great example of how social media can be used during times of need.

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