How To Use Social Media in a Disaster

If a fire, an ice storm, or even a terrorist attack struck your organization, would you immediately go online and Tweet about it? No? Well, maybe you should. So says a report from Janco. Yet most companies haven't considered how to deploy social-media tools as part of their disaster recovery and business continuity planning. While many of them have incorporated Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and YouTube as part of their branding, marketing and customer outreach efforts, they haven't learned how to exploit the same tools to communicate during an emergency. “Social networks are powerful,” says M. Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Janco. “They allow anyone to share – and hear – information transmitted from others in real time from anywhere. We've found that both true and false information is spread via social networks, in fact.” To get the right information into the right hands, organizations must come up with proactive social-media disaster-response plans.

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Instagram Back-Pedals, Restates User Content Policy

NEWS ANALYSIS: Believing that Instagram and Facebook were changing the rules without user input, the backlash from users and non-users alike was swift all through the social networks, especially Facebook. Thousands of Facebook members threatened to opt out of the service, many using language not appropriate for general consumption.

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iPhone Apps to Help You Survive the (Maybe) Impending Apocalypse

If you hadn't heard, the world is ending Dec. 21, so you had better run out and get that iPhone 5, because you sure aren't going to be in any condition to pick it up on Christmas, if the Mayans and a variety of eschatologists (theologians focused on the end of the world or humankind) are correct. One theory concerning our impending doom is an interaction between Earth and the black hole at the center of the galaxy, while others are more vague predictions of doom and gloom. Scholars from various disciplines have dismissed the idea of such cataclysmic events occurring in 2012, while professional Mayanist scholars have said predictions of impending doom are not found in any of the extant classic Mayan accounts, and that the idea that the Long Count calendar "ends" in 2012 misrepresents Mayan history and culture. Scientists—real scientists, anyway—have also dismissed the end of the world theories swirling around the Web, but better safe than sorry, as we like to say. With that in mind, while we don't know exactly what form the apocalypse will take, this range of apps for the iPhone will help you navigate floods, fires, zombies and other apocalyptic events. Good luck!

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