Via Innovative Interactivity:

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

By Tracy Boyer 2 March 2010 

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%u2019ve traditionally gotten from news websites. So what does this role reversal mean for news organizations and how can we embrace this change? I%u2019ll leave that one for you to figure out!

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....

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The benefits of social media just keep adding up!