Media organizations might consider dusting off those emergency preparedness plans beyond contact information and “ditch the building” locations to include how and when to use current technologies — using Union Univ. as a guide.
Union Univ. (Jackson, Tenn.) tried an interesting approach to emergency communications. The school used the free blogging tool Blogger and the social media service Facebook to update students and the school community following the Feb. 5 tornadoes that ripped through the South, devastating much of the college campus.
The school’s new UU Recovery Blog complements its Union University Facebook presence by allowing users to post comments to the page.
This isn’t the first time a school has leveraged blogs, MySpace, Flickr photo collections, Wikipedia, and other online sources for emergency communications. This also happened during and after last year’s Virginia Tech shootings to both communicate and to create virtual memorials. James Montgomery of MTV documented these links in his 2007 article, Virtual Memorial, MySpace Pages Help VT Mourners Cope Online.
Media organizations might develop an internal R&D wiki that captures the collective technological intelligence of its employees. Each department can use the tool to explore various technologies and how they might be used in the event of an emergency.
Is any news or media org already doing this? Please comment below.
(Thanks to Matthew Crawley for the tip.)
(CORRECTION: Due to an editorial error, when originally published this story incorrectly said that Union Univ. is located in Jackson, Miss. In fact, the school is in Jackson, Tenn.)
