IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/nathaz/v79y2015i1p171-193.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Examining the role of social media in California’s drought risk management in 2014

Author

Listed:
  • Zhenghong Tang
  • Ligang Zhang
  • Fuhai Xu
  • Hung Vo

Abstract

Social media creates an interactive information communication platform for disaster preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery. Recent research has analyzed the participation of social media in natural disasters, such as the Haiti Earthquake in 2010, Queensland floods from 2010 to 2011, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and Colorado flood in 2013, but little research has paid attention to drought risk management. In this study, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis method is used to evaluate the social media sites of governmental agencies that were directly involved in California’s Drought Task Force in the historic drought in 2014. The results show that state governmental agencies have used the popular social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter) as communication channels with professional stakeholders and the general public. The major functions of social media in the California drought risk management process included one-way information sharing, two-way information sharing, situational awareness, rumor control, reconnection, and decision making. However, social media was not active in donation solicitation and volunteer management. The two-way communication still stayed in relatively surficial levels with limited comments and inadequate conversations. A gap existed to reconnect public social media domain and personal social networks, even though drought risk was closely related to everyone’s daily life. During the California drought in 2014, Facebook worked actively in two-way information sharing for drought risk information and water conservation strategies; YouTube was a robust platform that attracted large number of views on drought videos; and Twitter played an effective role in reconnection of social networks to expedite drought risk information dissemination. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Suggested Citation

  • Zhenghong Tang & Ligang Zhang & Fuhai Xu & Hung Vo, 2015. "Examining the role of social media in California’s drought risk management in 2014," Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, Springer;International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, vol. 79(1), pages 171-193, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:79:y:2015:i:1:p:171-193
    DOI: 10.1007/s11069-015-1835-2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-015-1835-2
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11069-015-1835-2?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hao Tan & Yuyue Hao, 2022. "Mapping the Global Evolution and Research Directions of Information Seeking, Sharing and Communication in Disasters: A Bibliometric Study," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(22), pages 1-20, November.
    2. Dionne Mitcham & Morgan Taylor & Curtis Harris, 2021. "Utilizing Social Media for Information Dispersal during Local Disasters: The Communication Hub Framework for Local Emergency Management," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(20), pages 1-16, October.
    3. Md. Mahfuzul Islam & A. Aldrie Amir & Rawshan Ara Begum, 2021. "Community awareness towards coastal hazard and adaptation strategies in Pahang coast of Malaysia," Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, Springer;International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, vol. 107(2), pages 1593-1620, June.
    4. Mahsa Dalili Shoaei & Meisam Dastani, 2020. "The Role of Twitter During the COVID-19 Crisis: A Systematic Literature Review," Acta Informatica Pragensia, Prague University of Economics and Business, vol. 2020(2), pages 154-169.
    5. Richard Wagner Figueroa-Alfaro & Zhenghong Tang, 2017. "Evaluating the aesthetic value of cultural ecosystem services by mapping geo-tagged photographs from social media data on Panoramio and Flickr," Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 60(2), pages 266-281, February.
    6. Bevaola Kusumasari & Nias Phydra Aji Prabowo, 2020. "Scraping social media data for disaster communication: how the pattern of Twitter users affects disasters in Asia and the Pacific," Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, Springer;International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, vol. 103(3), pages 3415-3435, September.
    7. Yan Wang & John E. Taylor, 2018. "Coupling sentiment and human mobility in natural disasters: a Twitter-based study of the 2014 South Napa Earthquake," Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, Springer;International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, vol. 92(2), pages 907-925, June.
    8. Xiaoxue Cheng & Guifeng Han & Yifan Zhao & Lin Li, 2019. "Evaluating Social Media Response to Urban Flood Disaster: Case Study on an East Asian City (Wuhan, China)," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(19), pages 1-18, September.
    9. Tiezhong Liu & Huyuan Zhang & Hubo Zhang, 2020. "The Influence of Social Capital on Protective Action Perceptions Towards Hazardous Chemicals," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(4), pages 1-12, February.
    10. Mahsa Dalili Shoaei & Meisam Dastani, . "The Role of Twitter During the COVID-19 Crisis: A Systematic Literature Review," Acta Informatica Pragensia, Prague University of Economics and Business, vol. 0.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:79:y:2015:i:1:p:171-193. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.