Warning tweets: serial transmission of messages during the warning phase of a disaster event

Sutton, Jeannette; Spiro, Emma S.; Johnson, Britta; Fitzhugh, Sean M.; Gibson, Ben; Butts, Carter T.

doi:10.1080/1369118x.2013.862561

Cited by 204 publications

(224 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…This approach reduced the risk of selecting unofficial accounts and conformed to previous approaches to enumerate official accounts (see Sutton et al 2014). We observed that 48 of 50 state agencies held accounts with the exception of Pennsylvania and Idaho.…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 82%

“…Emergency managers can engage citizens using various social media functions such as replies, mentions, or hashtags to generate increased interaction and to encourage citizens to retweet key messages (Sutton et al 2014). Existing research, however, points to the fact that most online communication occurs in the form of one-way dissemination of protective action information from agencies to citizens as extension of previous public information officer functions (Sutton et al 2013b).…”

Section: Information Monitoring and Exchangementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In order to do this, we coded all 8671 tweets. Message types from previous research on warning and advisory messages (Sutton et al 2014) as well as other strategies and tactics (Wukich forthcoming) were adopted as a template to code message data. Using these examples, we conducted a content analysis of messages and manually assigned whether messages communicated advice and guidance, crowdsourcing requests, or used other tactics to engage citizens in a dialogue regarding risk reduction (see appendix for coding categories).…”

Section: Data Analysis and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Social network and microblogging sites such as Twitter facilitate the rapid transmission of information across multiple scales of action (i.e. individuals and organizations who represent different geographic regions, social sectors, and/or levels of government) (Bruns et al 2012;Sutton et al 2014). This is particularly useful in disaster situations since the quick dissemination of protective action information can mean the difference between life and death (Comfort 1999;Lindell and Perry 2012).…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While there is much social media activity among agencies across different policy domains, it is still a mechanism that is mostly used as an announcement system to push information out to the public, and rarely can we observe direct interactions with citizens (Mergel 2011(Mergel , 2013. While case study research in emergency management has illustrated strategies developed by early adopters and innovators, particularly during response and recovery operations Sutton et al 2014), less is known about how agencies use social media to engage and empower citizens across all phases of emergency management and across different geographic regions. In this article, we examine how and to what extent state-level emergency management agencies use social media to disseminate information and engage constituents in conversations and coordinated action across the different phases of emergency management.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Closing the Citizen-Government Communication Gap: Content, Audience, and Network Analysis of Government Tweets

Wukich

Mergel

2014

SSRN Journal

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Abstract:A key task in emergency management is the timely dissemination of information to decision makers across different scales of operations, particularly to individual citizens. Incidents over the past decade highlight communication gaps between government and constituents that have led to suboptimal outcomes. Social media can provide valuable tools to reduce those gaps. This article contributes to the existing literature on social media use by empirically demonstrating how and to what extent state-level emergency management agencies employ social media to increase public participation and promote behavioral changes intended to reduce household and community risk. Research to this point has empirically examined only response and recovery phases related to this process. This article addresses each phase of emergency management through the analysis of Twitter messages posted over a 3-month period. Our research demonstrates that while most messages conformed to traditional one-to-many government communication tactics, a number of agencies employed interactive approaches including one-to-one and many-to-many strategies.

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Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 82%

Section: Information Monitoring and Exchangementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Data Analysis and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Closing the Citizen-Government Communication Gap: Content, Audience, and Network Analysis of Government Tweets

Wukich

Mergel

2014

SSRN Journal

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Evolving Coverage of Risk in the Mass and Social Media

Friedman¹,

Sutton²

2020

The Handbook of Applied Communication Research

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Understanding the uncertainty of disaster tweets and its effect on retweeting: The perspectives of uncertainty reduction theory and information entropy

Son

Lee

Larsen

et al. 2019

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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The rapid and wide dissemination of up‐to‐date, localized information is a central issue during disasters. Being attributed to the original 140‐character length, Twitter provides its users with quick‐posting and easy‐forwarding features that facilitate the timely dissemination of warnings and alerts. However, a concern arises with respect to the terseness of tweets that restricts the amount of information conveyed in a tweet and thus increases a tweetʼs uncertainty. We tackle such concerns by proposing entropy as a measure for a tweetʼs uncertainty. Based on the perspectives of Uncertainty Reduction Theory (URT), we theorize that the more uncertain information of a disaster tweet, the higher the entropy, which will lead to a lower retweet count. By leveraging the statistical and predictive analyses, we provide evidence supporting that entropy validly and reliably assesses the uncertainty of a tweet. This study contributes to improving our understanding of information propagation on Twitter during disasters. Academically, we offer a new variable of entropy to measure a tweetʼs uncertainty, an important factor influencing disaster tweetsʼ retweeting. Entropy plays a critical role to better comprehend URLs and emoticons as a means to convey information. Practically, this research suggests a set of guidelines for effectively crafting disaster messages on Twitter.

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Warning tweets: serial transmission of messages during the warning phase of a disaster event

Cited by 204 publications

References 17 publications

Closing the Citizen-Government Communication Gap: Content, Audience, and Network Analysis of Government Tweets

Closing the Citizen-Government Communication Gap: Content, Audience, and Network Analysis of Government Tweets

Evolving Coverage of Risk in the Mass and Social Media

Understanding the uncertainty of disaster tweets and its effect on retweeting: The perspectives of uncertainty reduction theory and information entropy

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