Use of Social Media by U.S. Public Sector Emergency Managers: Barriers and Wish Lists

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with U.S. public sector emergency managers to probe barriers to use of social media and reactions to possible software enhancements to support such use. The three most frequently described barriers were lack of personnel time to work on use of social media, lack of policies and guidelines for its use, and concern about the trustworthiness of pulled data. The most popular of the possible technological enhancements described for Twitter are filtering by category of user/contributor, and display of posts on a GIS system with a map-based display.