"How To Guides for Small Town America"

To help local government understand the need for integrating Social Media Emergency Management (SMEM) as part of their Disaster and Assistance Plan, we need a step by step "How To" guide for accomplishing the goal of integrating Social Networks into day to day operations, and a second "How To" Guide for the private and volunteer sector to curate and/ or create local resources the community needs to access while waiting for Emergency Responders during and in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.

This would be applicable to not only possible major incidences, such as hurricanes, but also for smaller incidents that may not rise to the level of major disaster, but still have damaging effects. Emergency resources quickly become overwhelmed in small town America, and residents and local business are left to their own devices while waiting for additional support, and with little or no information forthcoming from the Town. SMEM can be implemented on a small scale as practice and preparedness for the "Big One". 

The town of Southold, NY, is one such example of small town America, where the area has suffered a number of damaging storms in recent months.

SoutholdVOICE Inc. is a not for profit 501 (c) 3, registered in NY. For more information about us, please see www.SoutholdVOICE.com and our presentation "Let's Get SMEM Smart"

At this time, not many folks understand that there is solid evidence from agencies and reputable NGOs that emergency responders who harness the power of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, TwitPic, and YouTube, do save life and limb, and more important, that significant numbers of the population expect emergency services to respond to social media calls for help.

Back in August, the American Red Cross published the White Paper, The Case for Integrating Crisis Response with Social Media, which outlined the history and current state of affairs around the public using social technologies to request help from themselves or friends and family during a crisis. The guide could include reference to this paper to help the uninitiated grasp the basic concepts.

To borrow a phrase from FEMA Director Craig Fugate, if we innovate at the speed of government, we'll never get there, but FEMA can give us the toolkit to help us at small town level understand the need, the urgency and to provide relevant "How To" Guides.

A local government that does not share information with the public in real time, or near real time, such as ours, results in the public's perception that government is doing nothing, essentially AWOL. Policy makers at higher levels get this, now local politicians also need to hear the message.

If you're not communicating with your constituents using Social Networks, the perception is that you're not doing anything.

Local Government needs to do a better job of using mobile networks, of using the public as a resource, and to help people stabilize themselves until the cavalry arrives. This requires a fundamental change in local government philosophy, so it's no longer a government centric approach to disaster planning. That message is not getting across fast enough at local level, a FEMA Guide will surely help.

In the meantime, SoutholdVOICE has taken the first step in our community to raise awareness of this important issue:

• We created a slide presentation "Let's Get #SMEMsmart"
• We created a Twitter Account @SoutholdVOICE
• We created a Facebook Page
• We have started adding Emergency Resource links to our website at the Resources tab
• We have added Twitter page at our website with feeds from local, regional, national responders, as well as mainstream media.

FEMA could assist us by setting up a series of websites to help Local Government and the private volunteer sector access information about solutions relevant to us, similar to www.HowTo.gov for Federal Agencies, which is a rich and powerful resource offering Apps for business, productivity and social media. There's even a brief video overview of Cloud Computing, what it is, and its benefits. Cloud computing is very powerful, very energy efficient (green), easy to implement and best of all - all providers offer FREE versions, which enable a huge cost effective leap forward for a small Town like ours. We need it, we should take advantage of it and we can give the benefit and cost savings back to the people. A summary of the Social Media Section appears below:

Social media apps make it easier to create and distribute content and discuss the things we care about and help us get the job done. Social media includes various online technology tools that enable people to communicate easily and share information. Social media includes text, audio, video, images, podcasts, and other multimedia communications.

How very well organized it is, how quickly you can pick what you need off the shelf and get it up and running. It's easy for us to take and implement what we need and gradually grow our operation - one baby step at a time. Let's make a website like this for small town America, useful for local government and volunteer sector alike, and include it in the "How To" Guide.

Let's make a start, let's get #SMEMsmart and take the time to prepare the "How To Guides for Small Town America".

Thank you for your time.