Kristin and I had the opportunity to do a webinar on our research study and presentation from ICRC this past March on Social Media Command Centers in Crisis.  We first met Karen and Jim at the ICRC Conference, and they expressed an interest in hosting a webinar with us for their company, Firestorm Solutions, on this particular topic. Both Kristin and I were very honored and excited about this wonderful opportunity.

Presenting research at ICRC 2013

How did we come up with this research study in the first place? Both Kristin and I have done previous collaborations in the area of social media, but we were discussing one day how so many brands, organizations, and agencies are all focused on getting a social media command center up and running. This was interesting for us to see since we were like – well, what are they actually measuring and monitoring? After looking at both the crisis academic and practitioner literature, we realized that this is something that needed to be explored further.

So, we went ahead and came up with this research idea – combining both of our perspectives together – into a comprehensive view of social media command centers in crisis. What is great about this is the fact we are coming from two different disciplines – I am coming in from PR and Kristin is from Systems Engineering. This is where the field is going and more companies and brands need to realize – welcome to the 21st century of professional and academic collaboration!

We were able to do the webinar yesterday, and we had about 130 people participate from six continents (wow!) – thank you to all who came to the webinar! The webinar was recorded, so if you did not have a chance to watch the webinar and are interested in the subject of social media command centers in crisis, here’s the video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmVnd0_GWSY[/youtube]

Overall, it was a fun project to work on not only with a great collaborator and researcher, but also my sister. 🙂 We are a family of researchers – our next conference will be in Washington D.C. for the APS Conference. As part of the tradition for the last couple of years, we have our t-shirts already designed related to our project, so that is fab! 🙂

Both Kristin and I want to thank Firestorm Solutions for giving us the opportunity to be part of this webinar – we had a wonderful time! Special thanks to Karen, Jim, and Bill of Firestorm Solutions for all of your hard work and commitment to making this webinar happen. We really appreciate it! 🙂

Hope you all are having a great day!

Best Wishes,
Karen