The Power of Social Media Comes Full Circle in Montana

This is a re-post of an arti­cle writ­ten by James Ridle that was pub­lished to his Facebook pro­file today. It’s repub­lished here in its entirety.

Today was a per­fect exam­ple as to how Twitter, other social media and the gen­eral power of the inter­net can directly effect news and per­ti­nent infor­ma­tion in a time of crisis.

And the play­ers were:

Twitter (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23bozexplod): con­tin­u­ous tweets about the acci­dent and those around it were avail­able via twit­ter moments after the explo­sion. The #boz­ex­plod hash­tag was in the top 10 hash­tags of the day since the explo­sion occurred. People were able to share real-time infor­ma­tion, advice, frus­tra­tion, sto­ries, pic­tures and blog posts in 140 char­ac­ters or less. The search page relat­ing to the explo­sion was updated in real time. The media in Bozeman has men­tioned Twitter a few times already. Michael Becker wrote up more on the power of Twitter dur­ing today’s events here:

http://www.hypercrit.net/2009/03/05/twitter-did-its-job-for-bozeman-today/

Streaming radio (http://www.kmmsam.com) was used to broad­cast the news con­fer­ences live, over the internet.

Flickr: (http://flickr.com/photos/crd/) & Twitpic: People took pic­tures and posted them, with a few news­pa­pers ask­ing to use the pho­tos in their stories.

Bozeman Daily Chronicle (http://twitter.com/bozchron, http://bozemandailychronicle.com) posted news of the explo­sion min­utes after it happened.

And we even have fancy Google maps giv­ing every­one a bird’s eye view of where every­thing happened:

Google Map http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&ll=45.67989,-111.033443&spn=0.004827,0.009238&t=h&z=17&msid=111490243384956875499.000464662ce5975ca6b0f

There are var­i­ous blog entries from peo­ple in Bozeman:

http://manifestbozeman.com/blog/2009/03/05/bozeman-montana-explosion-rocks-downtown/

http://tranquilityjones.blogspot.com/2009/03/quick-update.html

http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-225174

This is a per­fect exam­ple of cit­i­zens and busi­nesses in action, using social media and tech­nol­ogy in time of emer­gency. Here’s to hop­ing that state and local agen­cies will begin to use the power of social media in the future.

Related posts:

1. Social media as jour­nal­ism in a small city
2. Dabblers go home; jour­nal­ists need to be social media leaders
3. Web con­tent gen­er­ated from the Bozeman explo­sion today
4. #bozeplod, six months on
5. Twitter did it’s job for Bozeman today