Gleaning the wrong social media lessons from the Boston Marathon bombing

There's a lot of web chatter right now about the bad information which spread in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy at the Boston Marathon. And while it's important to understand how information spreads in an emergency - and how best to properly inform the citizenry, the finger-pointing and blaming of social dialog is ill-placed.

The real social media failure yesterday was that of the involved emergency response agencies.

The simple fact of the matter is that a lot of the initial clutter and bad information that went viral might have been mitigated had there been an immediate, pervasive and official social media response - particularly on Twitter.

Folks were understandably starving for information, and so they took it upon themselves to find and share what they could to fill the vacuum. The problem is, somehow, official reports were not in the mix of what these people found - at least not for a good while.

Boston Police confirming explosion at marathon finish line with injuries. #tweetfromthebeat via @cherylfiandaca
— Boston Police Dept. (@Boston_Police) April 15, 2013

(Almost a full hour after the first bomb went off)
The wild speculation and third-person misreporting could have been circumvented had the involved emergency response agencies 1) successfully leveraged pre-existing online reach to effectively spread official information and 2) enacted an emergency communications plan to immediately and successfully inform the public. Of course, both these points presuppose that the response agencies involved both made the investment to build their social reach before this disaster and had an emergency communications plan in place which accounted for social media.

Given the wide-spread misinformation, I'm guessing... not so much.

If you were following Twitter, for example, during the immediate aftermath of the bombings, official emergency response social channels were not really present in the conversation. Even if they were active - and I don't think many of them were for some time - their content either wasn't maximized for visibility so that it could go viral and/or these agencies hadn't done their due diligence of building a solid base of community reach before this event in order to give their content enough raw visibility to make it go viral organically.

FBI Assists Boston Police Department Regarding Explosions Along Marathon Route and Elsewhere: — Boston 1.usa.gov/13883Pq #FBI
— FBI PressOffice (@FBIPressOffice) April 16, 2013

(First FBI Press Office notice comes across Twitter several hours after the explosions)
And so the ensuing vacuum was filled with bad information.

I suspect some folks will use the ex post facto hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth over the spread of this bad information as a means for minimizing social media's role in an emergency. I would urge you to accept quite the opposite.

This shows why - even during times of "peace" - effective and professional social media use is profoundly important. Official organizations and representatives cannot wait for an emergency to build a social audience. Reach must be established ahead of time, and trust and credibility have to be earned through steady, long-term online communications. Otherwise, when an emergency happens, you'll find yourself speaking to an empty room and hoping everyone can figure it out themselves.

As Boston showed us, this is not a successful strategy.

I posted 5 photos on Facebook in the album "Marathon Bombing Response" fb.me/Oq5PN7Yu
— Mass National Guard (@MassGuard) April 16, 2013

(Mass. National Guard makes its first  direct Twitter mention [to its 1.3k followers] of its involvement in the response effort - several hours after the attack... oh, and it's an auto-feed from their Facebook page)
And then, even if you have a decent-sized online following, your content must be optimized for visibility (a la the inclusion of relevant hashtags, @replies, etc.). And determining what the relevant hashtags are in an emergency takes both forethought (perhaps by building out a hashtag theme index ahead of time) and on-the-spot research to see what's trending. These are time and resource investments which must be dedicated before tragedy strikes.

The Massachusetts #NationalGuard has more than 460 Guard members on scene in support of the Boston Marathon.
— National Guard (@USNationalGuard) April 15, 2013

(This was tweeted an hour after the event - indicating a significant Guard presence - yet NGB PAO didn't tweet again about the bombing or its involvement in the response for more than three hours after the first blast)
Either way and for whatever reason, the primary social media failure of yesterday's terrorist attacks belongs to the emergency response agencies which failed to get official information into the trending social conversation. As a result, a vacuum was created and consequently filled with disreputable information. To prevent this in the future, emergency response agencies and their communications staff will need to take more seriously both the construction and maintenance of their social channels during times of "peace," and their obligation to adequately include social response in their emergency communications plan.

UPDATE: I should mention that - by way of contrast - the JFK Library actually got this right - and put an early end to the misinformation circulating in their area of operation. Note the dramatically higher number of retweets and the time stamp. Kudos to them.

Investigators are investigating. Any tie to Boston Marathon explosions is pure speculation. More information as we receive it.
— JFK Library (@JFKLibrary) April 15, 2013

The political lean of different social media

As the infographic (found on Mashable) indicates, users of services on the left of this chart are more likely to vote for Obama, while users on the right are more likely to be Romney supporters. Services higher on the chart have more politically engaged voters, while those on the bottom have more politically disengaged users.

Click image to enlarge...

The take-away here, is that the largest social channels (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+) are relatively politically centrist, and pretty politically engaged. Meaning, the oft-encountered myth that the internet is dominated by the political Left is just not true. These social channels are the new age battlegrounds for political hearts and minds, and any campaign would be ill-advised to neglect using social media to engage constituents.

Most of TIME's 100 most influential using social media

"Influence" is a funky mistress, as a recent Klout review of TIME magazine's top 100 most influential people reveals.

“We define influence as the ability to drive action, and we find that keeping up a steady cadence of quality content inspires people to stay engaged with you online,” said Lynn Fox, who wrote the rankings post for Klout's blog.

We suppose that Fox meant "the ability to drive online action," because that's all Klout can realistically measure. Yet, as Mashable rightly notes, just over half (53%) of the TIME 100 even had Klout scores (because they were participating in social media). Still, it is interesting that a majority of the world's most influential people are using social media. It is more interesting, still, that most of those influential people have Klout scores that are indicative of their overall influence, as Mashable notes:

A shift in what drives influence greatly impacted the movers-and-shakers who landed on this year’s list. Justin Bieber is the only person with a perfect 100 Klout score, perhaps thanks to his “beliebers.” Bieber made last year’s Time 100. Other high scorers are Rihanna (95), Lady Gaga (94) and Barack Obama (92) — all on this year’s list. Mashable’s own Pete Cashmore ranks high, too, with a Klout score of 89.

Of course, one would expect the likes of the President and Lady Gaga to have pervasive presences on social media, right? The chicken/egg question here is whether their presence on social media drove their present-day influence, or if they turned to social media out of some sort of perceived obligation to tap every available marketing channel. Klout's blog noted the following:

As TIME Editor Rick Stengel writes in his excellent opening letter, “Before microphones and television were invented, a leader had to stand in front of a crowd and bellow. Now she can tweet a phrase that reaches millions in a flash. Influence was never easier — or more ephemeral.” This is an important statement from a publication that issues the annual barometer of real-world influence.

Not sure if that resolves our chicken/egg dilemma, but it raises a good point - and one upon which PolitiKlout is essentially founded - that social media influence is just an extension of real-world influence. If the relative clout, so to speak, of a Facebook or Twitter user didn't translate into real-world influence, it wouldn't be worth pursing. And so the opposite is true: because the relative clout of a social media practitioner does, in fact, tend to translate into real-world influence, it is absolutely worth targeting and leveraging.

Targeting matters, especially on social media

Targeting matters - and not just geographically. Each social medium has its own community, culture, zeitgeist  and standards. Pairing the demographic data PolitiKlout gives you with known information about certain social media can help you better ensure that your content is being seen by the relevant voters you seek to reach.

To that point, Mashable shared a new infographic today that helps you understand the basic differences of some of the major social media.

^ Click for larger image ^