Start Your Social Media Engines!

The Effects of Social Media
By Aimee Dodge

Social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Wikapedia, and Flickr are changing the way disaster situations are received and handled. They have played a major role in disaster response efforts over the past decade. Social media outlets allow people and organizations access to niche audience and enable multinational corporations to engage with employees in ways that have never been possible before.

Within hours of an earthquake striking Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, social networking sites were forming groups to support those effected. The New York Times created a Facebook page and Twitter account just to cover the news and current happenings in Haiti. The New York Times is only one of many news sources that created social networking accounts to get information out to more people. Through the use of social media networks, organizations not only succeeded in engaging and informing people, they also succeeded in mobilizing them. Eight days after the earthquake donors had contributed more than $355 million to aid Haiti through 35 U.S. nonprofit groups, according to Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The ability to instigate action is one of the most important aspects of social media. With the ability to make a single donation in one single rapid movement, social media promotes impulse donating. People are no longer left wondering how they can help because today’s social media and networking makes it easier than ever. All one has to do is send a text message or follow a link to a fund raising page to make a donation. Mailing donation requests is not a reliable means of reaching people. The majority of donations made to the relief effort in Haiti were made via the web.

Social media allows people to create communities and start movements. The day after the Haiti earthquake multiple Facebook groups had been formed to help Haiti, many having more than 100,000 members. People also used their Facebook accounts to let their friends know that they had donated to the relief effort and where they could go if they wanted to donate as well.