Utilising social media within incident response programmes

Humans are social creatures that learn from observing others. Until this century, the reach of social learning was confined to small groups or locales. However, the pervasive adoption of social media platforms has provided the means to augment social learning and empower virtual groups by transcending geographic and time boundaries. The broad adoption of social media across all demographic groups gives augmented social learning potentially broad applications, including within the realm of incident response. This article will discuss how augmented social learning can be a powerful tool to manage communications during high-impact 'black swan' events that require speed and agility when disseminating information, and for which no standard incident response 'playbook' is available.