#help! Japan is Considering Using Twitter and Social Networks for Emergency Notifications

On Wednesday the Japanese government hosted a panel discussion in Tokyo to discuss placing emergency calls through social networks during natural disasters, as reported by PCWorld. This was the first event of a three part program that will run through March of next year to discuss how to use social media during large disasters. The panel included the head of Twitter Japan as well as Yahoo Japan officials.

The thought is that when traditional voice-based infrastructure is impacted the social network might be a better alternative to process emergency requests. During Japan’s Earthquake that impacted several nuclear power plants, many of the Japanese citizens were only able to get updated information via the social network. The culture is quite fanatic about using cell phones and social media, so the government see this as a natural evolution for their emergency communication strategy.

On the surface this sounds like a practical and plausible solution to a difficult situation, however having managed a notifications platform, there is a lot of concern from a product perspective. Posting content and accessing the social media is only viable if the people have access to the service, cell phone service is not designed for the level of usage that occurs during a disaster. Alert notifications are a great tool, but you must have reserved capacity and if you are only using the service on rare occasion, your cost for reserving the bandwidth could become quite expensive over time.

But let’s assume the government can solve the bandwidth issue, now the question comes around geo-presence, how do you know where the person is if they are using it to tweet in an emergency? Yes the phone probably has a GPS chip and the location can be triangulated to near proximity of the cell tower, but how do you control this, how do you use it only in an emergency? You could probably build an app for this, but that would mean that now everyone has to install the application to tweet in an emergency and how do you train the masses on how to use the social network?

Finally, and this is my biggest concern, how do you prevent hacking, both on the notification and 911 inbound tweets. None of the social media sites that I have used provide any moderator level controls, which means if the government Twitter account gets hacked and someone send out an emergency alert, there would be wide spread panic.

Don’t get me wrong, these are the right discussion to be having, we need to find new ways to communicate to large groups of people, especially in a disaster, but if we are going to enlist the use of social media then these service providers have to find a way to manage security beyond their current methods.

Frank Toscano is a 15+ year specialist in cloud based services focusing on Product Management, Marketing and Security within the Cloud. He has worked for EasyLink Services and Premiere Global Services in a global role providing hosted services to Fortune 1000 clients. He is currently seeking employment with a cloud based provider in a senior level Product/Marketing role.