With all the buzz over the earthquakes in Haiti it seems that real time search combined with social networks are making strides in the relief efforts. Yesterday evening I watched traditional media coverage of the large search and rescue operations on standby while online Twitter and Facebook covered the efforts and situation that were happening on location.
Google Trends shows how quickly the search has become a hot topic:
It’s not a matter of who is the journalist or news anchor in the case of social media, concern over ownership of retweets or information privacy is out the window. In the case of crisis the network moves the news in order to expand the communal concern rather than respond to ratings.
Recently, an interesting thought was raised about how Social Media has become the news to Traditional Media. In comparison to being a reactionary channel for branding I think involvement in social media has a way to push communication past a professional news pitch to something that hits closer to home. In the case of Haiti news, almost instantly there were charitable actions being shared through the community.
There is great potential for new tools to help maintain the momentum by showing where the money that is being donated is being used to enrich the community. So when the dust settles where will that leave efforts in Haiti? Does Social Media have the ability to extend past the flash of the news to create a sustainable relief effort? If it is to be successful there needs to be a connection past generating the buzz and awareness to continuing the action of support. The ability to store the data from the buzz even has potential to help with generating action plans for the future.
Is it helping though? After all RT’ing and Facebooking don’t actually help get water or supplies to people. And most of the people in the country are too busy trying to survive to be using the social media outlets.
I’m not saying it’s been completely useless, but some perspective is handy.
The physical standpoint of actual relief to the situation no – but I think it does help with awareness and especially with the donation efforts. The Global Post has an interesting article about after every recent major disaster, misguided donations actually worsen the suffering. http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/haiti/100113/haiti-earthquake-aid
I think the title is over-egging it a bit, Social Media is helping to raise awareness and hopefully money, although I wish it were possible to know how much money has been donated via FaceBook/Twitter etc, as I have sneaky suspicion that people tend to think clicking retweet or joining a group counts as doing their bit – though I hope I am wrong.