Advice & inspiration

The importance of social media during natural disasters: a first-hand perspective in the aftermath of the Chile earthquake

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II Spanish editor Andrea Ballocchi is Chilean, and she recently underwent the traumatic experience of frantically trying to contact her loved ones in the minutes and hours after the earthquake in Santiago. She wanted to provide her personal account here to detail the vital role that social media played in enabling her to quickly learn about the extent of the damage and connect with her family.

Her first-hand perspective proves the importance of not only social media, but also of citizen journalists in providing the breaking information that we’ve traditionally gotten from news websites. So what does this role reversal mean for news organizations and how can we embrace this change? I’ll leave that one for you to figure out!

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Saturday around 2 am (Eastern time) I received a text message via my twitter account that read “Earthquake in Santiago!!” Immediately, I went online to figure out what had happened, only to find that almost all of the Chilean sites were down so I went back to my Twitter feed.

Many of my friends had already started tweeting important news, such as the intensity of the quake, the current damage, and the electricity issues. Telephones lines were down and lights were out, but for some reason the 3G kept working so almost everybody with a smart phone in Chile was tweeting. Activity on Facebook came a little later.

I never realized before how helpful social media could be during natural disasters. During the Haiti earthquake, Twitter proved to be an incredible tool to create awareness about the disaster and to mobilize people to help. In Chile, the case was a little different because it actually helped families and friends communicate with each other minutes afterward.

Although I was able to call my mom because her land phone was still working, I could not reach the rest of my family. Thanks to a direct message my brother sent me on Twitter, I knew that he was OK. Without Twitter, I wouldn’t have had this reassurance.

Quickly, hash-tags were created like #quake and #terremotochile to compile news from users about the earthquake, and now tags such as #buscapersonas are being used to search for missing people.

In addition, people have been sharing emergency phone numbers, links with missing person lists, a recompilation of information sites, and many other news articles, photos and videos through the intuitive interfaces and real-time capabilities of Facebook and Twitter.

I know that a lot of false information was spread though Twitter, such as the rumor of nonexistent tsunami warnings or fabricated death tolls, but other twitter users quickly declared these rumors as false, proving that social media is self-moderated.

Furthermore, non-profit organizations and other official sources are doing a great job creating a timeline of the earthquake and sharing tips and advice to cope with the situation. I think that @CruzRojainforma (Chilean Red Cross), is one of the best examples (many of their tweets are in English too, if you want to check them out). Also, many help movements were created through social media. Numerous Facebook groups and other initiatives quickly emerged, such as CrisisCampChile and chileayuda.com, a collaborative effort via Twitter.

Social Media, especially Twitter, turned out to be a really helpful tool in this disaster to create a vital communication channel that not only spread facts but also helped people come together and learn about the situation of loved ones.

The extensive network that I have built on Twitter and Facebook over the years enabled me to garner invaluable knowledge regarding the earthquake that never could have been replicated in my most trusted, traditional news sources.

Other posts that might interest you:

• Multimedia and social media coverage of the Haiti earthquake
• Student journalism project evolves into humanitarian effort after deadly tsunami
• Why we, as institutions and companies, should friend and tweet

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