Using Social Media to Enhance the Pacific Disaster Center's Relationship with the Online Community

The Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) seeks to build a more resilient world by supplying both decision makers and the general public information they need to better prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters.   To do this, PDC collects complex data sets from a variety of different sources, and transforms and consolidates them into an easy-to-understand format.   The goal is to harvest discrete and sparse data points, translate and combine them into comprehensible and actionable knowledge, and to provide easy access to the public and the emergency managers, so that the results can be used in life saving operations and in mitigation planning.  To reach a wider audience, PDC is expanding its use of social media.  As part of its expansive strategy, we are creating brief but informative videos for our YouTube channel that will introduce PDC’s Web-based and mobile applications to more people in the online community.  We plan to design and develop 3 to 5 videos incorporating graphics, photos, and both new and archival footage of various applications.  Once our YouTube channel is populated with instructional videos, we plan to continue enhancing our social media presence by finding ways to reuse, cross-link, and improve content of our YouTube, Facebook and Twitter sites.  By placing this information wherein the online community is already comfortable, we will reach and educate more people about disaster reduction means, tools, and information, and ultimately, move one step closer to fostering a society that is better able to prepare for and respond to disasters.