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Title

Priceless tweets! A study on Twitter messages posted during crisis: Black Saturday

Author(s)

Sinnappan, Suku;  Farrell, Cathy;  Stewart, Elizabeth

Abstract

Twitter has been regarded as an outstanding social media application due to its immediacy in communication. Twitter has experienced exponential growth and been used for various purposes including crisis communication. However, there have been less empirical studies on Twitter messages (tweets) posted during crisis. In this paper, we analyse the tweets that were posted during Australia’s worst fire disaster - Black Saturday. We propose a new coding scheme for tweets during crisis and propose further research into how Twitter can be used as an alternative communication tool during crisis to support official communications, in particular, reflecting ground level conditions. Further, we find that tweets made during Black Saturday are laden with actionable factual information which contrasts with earlier claims that tweets are of no value made of mere random personal notes.

Publication type

Conference paper

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Higher Education, Lilydale

Source

Proceedings of 'Information Systems: Defining and Establishing a High Impact Discipline', 21st International Conference on Information Systems (ACIS 2010), Brisbane, Australia, 01-03 December 2010, paper no. 39

Publication year

2010

Keyword(s)

Black Saturday;  Crisis;  Emergency communication;  Fire;  Twitter

Publisher

Association of Information Systems Electronic Library

Publisher URL

http://aisel.aisnet.org/acis2010/39

Copyright

Copyright © 2010 Suku Sinnappan, Cathy Farrell and Elizabeth Stewart. The authors assign to ACIS and educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to ACIS to publish this document in full in the Conference Papers and Proceedings. Those documents may be published on the World Wide Web, CD-ROM, in printed form, and on mirror sites on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the authors.

Full text

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