Because of the county’s geographic location, “We do not have a strong broadcast or print media market or presence,” Hamilton notes. “In a typical ‘news cycle,’ coverage for our county would be provided mostly by local print services, we generally only receive attention from the Baltimore or Philadelphia broadcast media during major news events or emergencies. By using Twitter and other social platforms, we can directly reach our core audience in a direct and timely way.
Cecil County uses just a single Twitter feed. “We issue about four to five Tweets a week, on the average,” says Hamilton. “About 75 percent are emergency-oriented. We carefully balance how many non-emergency Tweets we post. Most of our Tweets are about severe weather, others typically are about transportation issues like accidents, and hazmat events,” says Hamilton.
“We find Twitter is extremely valuable to reach not just general population but also to get fast-breaking information to traditional media, compared to the time cycle to write and issue a traditional press release,” adds Hamilton.
The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) has enough to tweet about that they have multiple Twitter accounts, says Brian Humphrey, firefighter/specialist and public service officer for the LAFD’s Emergency Public Information (EPI) Center.
The LAFD currently has 106 fire stations spread across 470 square miles, and serves a population of roughly four million people who speak nearly 150 different languages.
“We try to use the best possible tools for the LAFD Everywhere initiative to connect to people who need timely information they can act on,” says Humphrey. “We look at the four phases of an incident, Preparedness, Mitigation, Response, and Recovery, and we try to find the best tool possible.”
Twitter, according to Humphrey, “is associated mostly with Response. We also use Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, BlogTalkRadio to do radio call-in shows and even put things on iTunes.”
The LAFD started using Twitter in 2006 in a generic account, and officially began in March 2007, with @LAFD. “We quickly added @LAFDTalk, so we could use @LAFD just for alerts and advisories, using @LAFDTalk as a ‘conversational’ channel for people with inquiries and questions, about fires and about LAFD,” recalls Humphrey. “@LAFDTalk, which we started up in March 2009 has had about 27,000 tweets to date, up through June 2013,” reports Humphrey,” he adds.
The LAFD doesn’t just send tweets; they also monitor tweets. For example, in 2007, during a wildfire in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, tweets fro
m individuals about hot spots and wind direction helped the LAFD firefighters control the blaze.
Currently, according to Humphrey, LAFD’s Twitter accounts have about 30,000 followers, plus the uncountable ones following via Twitters 40404 SMS gateway or simply watching without registering to follow. Learn how to use Twitter to send an SMS. For comparison, Humphrey reports, “We have about 60,000 users who have signed up for our email alerts.” Plus, of course, there are all the people who get the phone calls from the county-run automatic dial-out system.
In terms of tweet volume, “@LAFD had 2,098 tweets in 2012,” according to Humphrey.
Twitter Pros and Benefits
There are compelling reasons to add Twitter.
Currently, Twitter itself is free both to post to and to follow messages on (although, like any private Internet service, that could change at any time). So, other than the minute-or-less to compose and post each message, there’s no incremental cost to using Twitter, and if your Emergency Notification System includes a Twitter gateway, there’s not even that time bump.
And many people use, even prefer, Twitter as an information-watching tool versus email, text messages, social media sites or classic websites. It’s easily usable from smartphones, and even “dumb phones” can be used, by requesting Tweets be send as text messages.
