Using social architecture to analyzing online social network use in emergency management

Emergency Management Agencies (EMA) are increasingly adopting online social network (OSN) such as Twitter and Facebook for interacting with partner institutions and citizens for sourcing and distributing of vital crisis information. However, EMA need to study and analyze how well they are using and, how they should be using the OSN. This paper adopts a holistic social architecture driven approach and demonstrates how to systematically study and analyze OSN adoption in the Australian EMA case study. The results of this study indicate that OSNs do not replace traditional systems and should be considered a part of the whole crisis information management environment. Further, it indicates that a holistic social architecture driven approach seems useful for studying and analyzing the OSN-enabled EMA crisis information management environment, which is critical for the identification of opportunities for improvement.