Crisis informatics – the application of information technology to aid in the mitigation of and response to natural and man-made disasters, is an increasingly growing field. Social media isn’t just useful during a disaster; it can also help when you want to go back and look at what happened during a crisis to see how an organization responded to data as it became available, or simply to look at how information flowed to try to optimize it for the next disaster.
This kind of crisis informatics is precisely what one of our partners, nContext, did for a large insurance company. They integrated large amounts of social media, weather data, and corporate data trying to deal with the impact that Hurricane Sandy had on the insurance company’s client base. The integrated data picture allowed the team to walk through temporal situations to see where social media popped up in response to weather and what resources were available to respond. By watching what happened, the company could determine if they responded appropriately. Further, they can run analytics on their data to determine if particular insurance agents were overloaded. All of these tools allow the insurance company to make smart changes to their policies that will improve their response to future disasters and, ultimately, their bottom line.
Read this crisis informatics blog post for more information.
