Case Study: Mumbai Blasts 2011ISCRAM 2012 Summer SchoolThe Role of Social Media in Crisis ManagementAjay Kumar - @ajuonline E: mail@ajuonline.net W: http://aju.bz/meMSc(IT), BE(Comp.) 23-08-2012, Tilburg UniversityMSc PSTS - University of Twente

The Event• Often referred to as 13

July or 13/7

• Series of three coordinated bomb

explosions at different locations in 

Mumbai, India, on 13 July 2011

between 18:54 and 19:06 IST.

• The blasts occurred at the 

Opera House, Zaveri Bazaar, and 

Dadar West localities, leaving 26

killed, and 130 injured.

Reaction & After Effect

• Phone lines Jammed & Communications

Ceased for at least a few hours.

• Other metro cities put on high alert.

• Mumbai Police sent an SMS to a few mobile

phone users in Mumbai reading "Bomb blasts

reported at Zaveri Bazaar, Dadar. Please be

careful. Stay indoors. Watch news channels".

People were using Social Media for?

• Offers of Help - #Here2Help▫Blood Donors▫Shelter▫Transport – I am heading this way, anyone needs

help?• Requests for Help - #NeedHelp

▫Blood▫Transport – I am stuck here!

• Missing/Found People• Injured• List of Police/Hospital Contacts

Communication Channels/Mediums•SMS•TV/News Channels•Twitter - #hashtags•Facebook – “I am OK!”•Google Docs/Spreadsheet•Skype – Coordinating Tasks•Ushahidi – Aggregating, Information,

Curating

Coordination with SBTF• People from

other parts of the world helping.

• Such teams who-know-what-to-do during a crisis are useful.

• Monitoring, Aggregating, Communicating

Outdated Messages•Tweets sent at 9:30 pm about roadblocks and

traffic jams were still being re-tweeted hours later.

•We made sure that such information does not make it on the map. 

•All content tagged on the page is moderated with the hope of providing useful information. 

•"We read the time stamp of the information tweeted and decide if it's stale or whether it should form part of our page." 

The document was created by  Nitin Sagar, an IT engineer in Delhi, 1,200km (720 miles) away

Web of Trust/Influence/Reach

Web of Trust/Influence/Reach

Statistics:

• Hits - Day 1 (13th July 2011) - 197684 - Page Views - 58513 - Traffic - 2326445 KB

• Hits - Day 2 (14th July 2011) - 188403 - Page Views - 47850 - Traffic - 1771850 KB

• Peak Traffic Hours - 16 and 17 (as per GMT) IST=+5.5

• Tweets “search engine”/scheduler START time - July 13, 2011, 8:06 pm

• Tweets “search engine”/scheduler END time - July 15, 2011, 11:24 pm

• Twitter “Messages” Read by System - 10,101 (RT, Spam etc)

• #mumbaiblasts - 7161 messages of 10101.

Expect Distractions & Bad Apples

•Someone messing up with the “public” sheet

Lessons Learned•Avoid Redundancy - Stop when the time is

right.•Don’t push a tool or platform – Community will

use what is easy & familiar for them.•Monitor, Aggregate, Respond & Communicate•Coordinated Task Forces to do the above. E.g.

SBTF can be helpful.• Identify the community – Affected Directly or

Indirectly? Shift Focus/Attention accordingly.• Identify Rumours• Identify Trusted/Influential People

Thank You• Questions?• E: mail@ajuonline.net• MumbaiBlasts CrisisMap:

http://fmi.me/mumbai• http://aju.bz/me

• Ajay Kumar - @ajuonline• MSc PSTS (2012-2014) –

University of Twente, Netherlands

• MSc (IT), BE(Computing) - India