The Social Media Tsunami

Graphic from the Honolulu Advertiser showing the path of the tsunami over time.

Our close call with the tsunami in Hawaii day before yesterday (or what some are calling the “pseudonami”) turned out to be an amazing display of social media in action.

For me, this started just before midnight on Friday, when I finished watching a movie, switched to live TV and saw the news about the 8.8 earthquake in Chile, and the possible tsunami warning for Hawaii. I immediately went to my home office to take a peek at the chatter on Twitter, which as expected, was on fire.

I had a decision to make. I was supposed to be in the water on scuba early Saturday morning with a friend visiting from Canada who hadn’t dived in a while, but was anxious to go on a guided tour after snorkeling here in Maui for a week. I decided there was nothing I could really do until the morning, and if the dive was going to happen at all, I needed my sleep.

My alarm went off at 5:00 a.m. Saturday morning, I made coffee and went back to my office. Twitter was still on fire, and I turned on the small TV on my desk while sorting through the conversations on TweetDeck. The TV was tuned to KGMB9, and there was Steve Uyehara and Tannya Joaquin, who had apparently been there for hours.

My phone rang. It was my friend from Canada, who had just been paid a friendly visit from Civil Defense, who was evacuating everyone in the flood zones. So much for our dive. As scheduled, the first tsunami sirens sounded at 6:00 a.m., and kept sounding at regular intervals after that.

For the rest of the day, I was awash in chatter from several different sources, and doing what I could to contribute, relay and help. I had several live feeds going simultaneously with the sound on, so I could listen selectively while I traversed the #hitsunami tweets and links, sharing anything relevant I thought might be helpful.

My sister, who lives outside of Seattle, knew from experience that CNN was probably not painting the real picture and sent me email to get the real scoop, knowing we were probably trying to keep the phone lines clear. I had much better data from the Hawaii media and my social graph, so I hadn’t even paid attention to CNN and didn’t know what she was seeing. She wasn’t on Twitter, so I directed her to my Facebook Wall and told her to keep an eye on me there.

It occurred to me that not long ago, the telephone really was the only real way of getting any scoop at all. I was living in the Bay Area during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and I remember how the phone lines were completely jammed up. Now, we’re able to rely on texts and social networking to keep track of just about anything in near real time.

What really struck me about the events of the day was how old and new media blended together so seamlessly. I saw tweets go out with images and video from citizen journalists on the scene all over the islands that got picked up and aired by news anchors. The anchors would also pose questions online or on the air and get instant responses from their social graph.

It was a powerful display of social media working right alongside traditional media to inform by engaging in an ongoing conversation. Old and new media are not in competition for dominance, as some might think. We’re co-evolving.

There were some tense moments when the clock read 11:05 a.m., the estimated time the first wave was supposed to hit Hilo. We were all glued to the KGMB9 live feed from there, and saw how the ocean oscillated back and forth with tremendous power over the next hour or so. Had the tide been higher, the outcome might have been very different. We were all thankful it turned out to be a non-event.

It’s hard to describe the level of connectedness we seemed to have as an online community that day. We were truly what Hawaiians call an ohana. We were able to keep each other and the rest of the world informed in an unprecedented way, and that allowed everyone to stay calm and focused.

I was also impressed by the preparedness of our government officials, emergency services and Civil Defense on the the islands. They got everyone to safety quickly and efficiently, and preventing panic. My friend Roxanne Darling reminded me later that evening to send a thank you to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center for doing such a great job, and I was more than happy to do so. It turned out to be a heck of a dry run, and Hawaii should be proud.

Where were you, and what are your feelings about the event?

Tagged as: hawaii, tsunami