Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to find out how Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service would handle the social media aspect of a major incident.
GMFRS is showing that they are moving with the times and are well up to date with one of the most used sources for public discussion.
With over 500 million currently active Twitter accounts, this social media website has an enormous amount of people that can be reached quickly and effectively which Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service is choosing to make use of.
Unfortunately, not all of the information that is Tweeted each day is accurate or factual.
Hence why this site, if left unchecked, could very quickly and easily damage the reputation that the service has built up over many years.
Fortunately, this is not the case with the GMFRS Twitter feed.
We have a fantastic team over at Corporate Communications that I had the fortune to spend the day working with to witness how they deal with major incidents.
Whilst there, I saw first-hand how quickly news of a major incident spreads across Twitter via a social media simulator at a big training exercise.
However, no sooner had the information been Tweeted, GMFRS replied to inform and provide reassurance anyone discussing it. We were also able to respond to questions and provide contact details for helplines and updates.
One of the main areas highlighted was that people panic when they do not know what is going on and the panic spreads at an unbelievable speed.
During an incident, each time a news report is released, Twitter is overrun with comments and questions relating to it.
Due to Twitter being used a part of everyday life for many people, we found that Twitter seem to have details of an incident before full news reports could get the information to us.
This really highlighted the immense power that social media such as Twitter has, and the impact that it can have on the rest of society.
This was not just with the public, it has an impact within the organisation as Twitter was even used to send out a wide reaching message to staff alerting them to the problem and asking the not to go directly to the scene but to head into a station so staff could be organised properly.
If I could not see it before, I can truly see the power in social media now.
Pictured are officers and staff from around GMFRS at a briefing during the training exercise
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