In the first quarter of 2012, we conducted an exploratory study into the use of social media in the security domain (PDF). This study shows that the security domain mainly uses social media to provide information about work, the organization and in the event of incidents and calamities. However, everything starts with listening. In order to know what is going on, organizations must learn to listen even better. In a study among alumni of the Master Crisis and Disaster Management and Master Crisis and Public Order Management and among participants in the Information Manager program in the crisis management column, strikingly large differences can be seen in the use of social media. When it comes to the use of social media within the work, they are mainly used as a source of information. A number of users also use it for environmental analysis, for example during incidents.
What is striking is that the vast majority does not listen efficiently on social media. Only a few list to data use tools such as RSS feeds (the ability to automatically retrieve new messages on websites and bundle them into one overview) and dashboards such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite (the ability to read and send messages from social media in one place).
We see that monitoring tools are increasingly meeting the needs, but that organizations do not always connect to these tools. We expect that to change in 2013. Monitoring the environment will become the aorta of the safety domain. The expectation is that the Twitcident tool will play a major role in this, as evidenced by the latest experiences in Enschede at Serious Request with the system .