Social Media: Blogging Out the Noise!

I have so many apps on my iPhone that I don’t know if there are enough “ping-sounds” in the world to help me distinguish who is alerting me when. I get a doodle-do for a text message and a ding-ding for breaking news. The sound I would imagine a shooting star would make (if there was sound in space) lets me know I’ve got an email … or a new Facebook comment … or a weather alert.

With all the noise coming from my pocket, how can I tell what actually matters? Short bits of information, 140 characters, flying at me in pop-up screens with rounded corners, begging for my attention.

Blah-ding! My meeting starts in 15 minutes!

Blah-dah! House to vote to reopen government!

Hear ye! Hear ye! My external transfer has been processed!

And now Twitter has the nerve to introduce more alerting? That was my initial reaction. Oh no … no more … But all it took was a little research and nudge to my brain to understand the potential.

At Everbridge, we know that our clients need to be first: the first to know, the first to respond, the first to communicate, the first to react. And we also know that you were the first to realize the power of social media in crisis management. So we #tagged along with you! And we saw, through your eyes, the life-saving power of social media. With the introduction of Everbridge Interactive Visibility in 2012, we took a huge leap toward the future of crisis and emergency management.

And now, Twitter is seeing it too! And I couldn’t be more delighted.

You can read more about Twitter Alerts here, but it’s a very simple idea: proven do-gooders and organizations with critical life-saving information are vetted by Twitter and given the go-ahead to send Twitter Alerts. Then we, as the general tweet-receiving public, can opt-in to receive either SMS messages to our mobile devices (ping!) and/or push notifications from the Twitter app (ping!) as well as visual indicators on the Tweet itself (silent ping!).

So, as visionaries responsible for saving lives and making a difference, let’s work together to take advantage of this great new feature from Twitter. And let’s not let it become just another noise that reminds me to turn my phone on silent in the conference room.

To help you with this, here are some ideas on how you can utilize Twitter Alerts as an extension of the Everbridge solutions suite:

1. Monitor Twitter Alerts in your universe by setting up a threshold for the Twitter Alerting authorities you care about (e.g. alert me when 1 tweet that contains #alert is from @TravelGov)

2. Automatically send targeted notifications to those who need to be “first” when the Twitter Alerting authorities you care about send #alert (e.g. when 1 tweet from @fema contains #alert, call my first responders on their mobile phones)

3. If you are a Twitter Alerting authority yourself, initiate your Everbridge notification templates by triggering your own thresholds with your #alert tweets

Share more ideas on Twitter Alerts with us by commenting on our blog below or tweet us @everbridge!