The Vinculum Business, Management and Communication for the 21st Century

Social Media and Calamities

I have been talking all about New Social Media in this blog and, maybe, some of you just want enough of it. Haha. Anyway, NSM has penetrated almost all aspects of our life and I have written about some of them here—most are in the context of businesses and organizations. I think it is just timely to take a look on how social media helped the initiatives of different individuals and organizations in helping the victims of storm Ondoy.

The Internet: From Pornography to Charity

I saw a video in Facebook about how flood invaded the University of the East Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Medical Center complex. Through Facebook sharing options, the video became viral.

The video, by the way, is hosted by YouTube which has channels for different Ondoy-related videos. YouTube embedding options made it possible for these videos to be posted in many blogs.

Readers of blogs can tweet or plurk what they read or saw.

Speaking of Twitter and Plurk, it is a trend to ReTweet or RePlurk the different ways how one can help. Imagine how this 140 character statement, like the UERMMC video, can become viral.

Wiki Spreadsheet

My Twitter and Plurk timelines are full of these kinds of tweets and plurks. What caught my attention were the wiki-type platform of Sahana Disaster Management System and Google Spreadsheets. They have different, free, sociable mechanisms to help people help other people.

Ondoy might have threatened or taken the livelihood and lives of many but social media exists to resist this threat and, more importantly, save threatened lives.

For Hotlines/Directories and Ways on how you/different institutions/individuals can help, you can see Inquirer’s and/or Yahoo!’s compilation.

Take care everyone!

Tweet This Post