Emerging Tech Talk #017 – Martin Murray on Using Twitter, YouTube and other Social Media During A Natural Disaster

January 19th, 2009 by Dan York

How can Twitter, YouTube and other social media be used during the recovery from a natural disaster?

In this episode, host Dan York spoke with Martin Murray, principal spokesperson for Public Service of New Hampshire (PSNH), about how he used Twitter, YouTube and other social media during the severe ice storm in December 2008 that caused over 60% of the state to lose power. Martin also spoke a bit about issues related to restoring power with regard to the physical infrastructure. He can be found on Twitter at http://twitter.com/psnh or at http://www.psnhnews.com/

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As is probably obvious from the various blogs I write at, I continue to be fascinated by the ways that social media technologies and micro-blogging in particular are changing some of the ways in which we communicate. Perhaps it is the ubiquitous access through mobile devices… perhaps it is the “one-to-many” aspects of the conversations within something like Twitter. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that we are seeing a new communication method emerge out of all these status updates across all the various services. Whether that is good or bad, or whether it is useful or not, are all perhaps larger questions for another time. In the meantime, I hope you found this interview with Martin Murray interesting.

P.S. If you are interested in the topic, you may also be interested in the 30-minute audio interview I did with Martin for the For Immediate Release (FIR) podcast. Given that FIR is focused on the public relations side of “communications”, Martin and I went deeper into the PR/communications side of using social media as well as the challenges of doing that within the context of a larger company.


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This Voxeo podcast can be found on the web at http://blogs.voxeo.com/ett. If you have comments or feedback about this show, you can either leave comments here on the show blog site or email Dan York.

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Related posts:

  1. Emerging Tech Talk #33 – Build apps that use Twitter for customer interaction with IMified
  2. Emerging Tech Talk #012 – What is your personal disaster communications plan?
  3. Emerging Tech Talk #018 – Open Source and Microblogging

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One Response to “Emerging Tech Talk #017 – Martin Murray on Using Twitter, YouTube and other Social Media During A Natural Disaster”

  1. ….::: VOX POPULI :::…. » Blog Archive » Using Twitter to Respond to Natural Disasters Says:

    [...] York of Voxeo has posted a great interview with Martin Murray of Public Service of New Hampshire (PSNH) detailing the utility’s response [...]

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