Kym Charlton Digital Story

Transcript

You wouldn’t believe it, if someone wrote an exercise along the lines of what we went through in December and January and February this year. It was just an extraordinary series of events. I remember thinking, ‘Should I be doing this?’ And I figured that I’d either be talking to the Coroner about why yes I had the ability to get this information out, and I didn’t because I didn’t have a policy. And I just made the decision, no, we need to be doing this. I have to say though, that during the periods of the floods and cyclones there was a common purpose. And a single mind in the users of our page. People wanted to help. They wanted to share information.

We kicked off the Facebook page in May in 2010 and we started off very quietly. We had about 6 thousand likes and obviously about 22 of December it started to rain up North and then Cyclone Tasha crossed the coast on Christmas Day. In that period of time, from the beginning of December to the ninth of January we went from about 6 thousand likes up to 18 thousands likes. As people started to look for somewhere to get information as Central Queensland and Northern Queensland became affected by flooding. People were increasingly going to our page as we were, were directing the media there to get resources. The media started to direct the public there. And then the awful events of Toowoomba and Lockyer happened.

We went from 18 thousands likes at the beginning of that 24 hour period to 165 thousand likes in 24 hours. Every time we logged on we’d have 5 thousand more friends.

Jenny – That’s just phenomenal, isn’t it?

It was incredible and it was, it was an indication that people were using it and it was a useful resource for them. Obviously that was a 24 hour period that also Brisbane and Ipswich were told – ‘you’re in for a big flood’. So we had so many people knowing that they were going to be affected and seeking information.

Jenny – Now, how did you go about putting that information on to twitter and facebook? How did you get around that?

As Executive Director of Police Media, I was involved in the meetings and the briefings out at Kedron. I was actually sitting in the room with the Premier and the Deputy Commissioner and all of the stakeholders as the Premier was being briefed by everyone around the state. You know, we had our teleconferences with all of the disaster coordinators from around the state. And very early on in the process I realized that I was hearing a lot of information that would be really useful for people but in all reality mainstream media wouldn’t be in the position to provide the information. It wouldn’t be newsworthy enough, and there’s only so much that mainstream media can pump out. So I started to tweet the information during the briefings. I would tweet something, and within five minutes it would be scrolling across the screen on a television. The mainstream media found what we were doing really useful as well.

A couple of things that we did. We started to livestream all of our press conferences. And we found that international media were actually using that straight off our YouTube channel. At the peak we had something like 44 thousand people watching our livestream press conference off of our Facebook page, which just goes to show the amount of international interest, the amount of interest around Australia, where they couldn’t access that live coverage, or didn’t have electricity and were watching it on their mobile phones.

We had someone from the Lockyer Valley tell us that she was keeping up to date with what was happening through her daughter, who was, I think, in Belgium. Who was looking on the Facebook page and then ringing Mum up and telling her what was going on. And that’s the thing with social media, as well, you are not talking to an end audience. This is not people who are passively accepting information from you. You are talking about people who are actively sharing information. You know that is what social media is all about. They are an active part of disseminating and sharing information.

There is this amazing good-will in social media to help out. We tweeted during the floods for some people to come and help us. We got a couple of interns who just turned up and worked for a couple of weeks. We tweeted for translations and we had professional translators just doing translations of our press conferences. For us, that we would then put on our Facebook page. Just this amazing good-will out there. And amazing resources. So once again, you don’t own the information, why not set it free so people can do useful things with it?

Jenny – Kim, the website also provided an important role of busting myths, didn’t it? Tell me about that?

Yeah. Yeah. People love a good rumour, and the joy, one of the things with social media is whereas once upon a time rumours spread over the back fence, now they can spread so quickly. And we had some great rumours. We had, every dam in Queensland, at some point, was failing, or had collapsed. Lots of great rumours. And we realized they were spreading on social media, so we started to use the mythbuster hash tag. Just to kill off those absolutely black and white rumours.

Jenny – I guess that social media can lead to panic fairly quickly if things are allowed to run riot.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And what would envitably happen was it would run on social media and then we would start getting enquiries from the mainstream media, or the Premier would be asked about them in the press conference. So by us being able to manage information on social media and make sure that misinformation was corrected very quickly. It prevented the mainstream media trying to chase up a story that wasn’t right, so it helped, helped sort of weed out some of the worst of the rumours.

Jenny – So what was the atmosphere in the media room and also over at headquarters over at Kedron where they were coordinating the disaster effort.

The feeling out at Kedron over those weeks was just so, I mean, amazingly. There was just so many amazingly professional and capable people dealing with an extraordinary series of events. ‘Cause it just was a rolling series of disasters – every day and another community would be affected. Every day something else would pop up and then we had that week off. And then we had cyclone Yarsi. So to watch my colleagues, my police colleagues, and emergency services deal with those series of events. Just amazingly capable people – you are dealing with Police and with, you know, people who have seen, have-have had a career of dealing with difficult situations.

You know, one of our disaster coordinators worked around the clock knowing full well that he had several feet of water through his house. And, you know, he, that was just put aside almost, while he did what he had to do.

Jenny – When you reflect back on the summer that you have just been through, and you think about the social media and how it exploded throughout that time. Do you think that, that saved lives?

I can’t say it saved lives. I can say that a lot of people tell us that felt far more confident that they were aware of what was going on. That they were getting really good information. It definitely helped the public feel like they were engaged and were aware of information that they perhaps wouldn’t have received otherwise. We had so many people say that it made a massive difference to their awareness of the situation. And it also gave them a point of engagement. You know it gave them somewhere they could talk with each other. Talk with other people who were affected. It helped what could have been a very isolating experience become a rallying point. The number of times that we had someone, you know, post “Queenslander” on the page. And it was just, it was wonderful to see the community spirit, I think that really did help with engaging people and bringing them together as a cohesive. You know, we will get through this as a community. So I think that’s, once again the social media – it is digital word of mouth. It is the community talking to each other and we were just a part of that.