• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, March 9, 2012

While government spooks are sniffing around social media for surveillance purposes, there’s a less intimidating side to social media monitoring, which also enables quicker responses to natural disasters. In fact the American Red Cross has set up a Digital Operations Center to track social media in the immediate aftermath of disasters, letting the organization know where to allocate personnel and resources to assist with recovery.

The Digital Operations Center culls data from social media sources including Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, then aggregates the data and translates it into visual form on a dashboard displaying a stream of relevant social media content. It was created for the Red Cross by Dell, and in fact is modeled on Dell’s own Social Media Listening Command Center; the data monitoring and aggregation is performed by Salesforce.com’s Radian6 social media monitoring platform. It includes information on the volume of social media posts, sentiment analysis, and high-trending keywords, among other types of data.

People who are interested in helping out on the digital front can sign up to become a Digital Volunteer, as part of a new Red Cross program that will train participants to answer questions from the public and disseminate information online.

As noted, there has been a wave of social media monitoring projects in recent months. The Department of Homeland Security has admitted in a public statement that it creates profiles to monitor “publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards,” including social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, in what is known as the “Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative.” The aim is to “to provide situational awareness” for the federal, state, and local governments.  Meanwhile the FBI's Strategic Information and Operations Center is working to create an “Open Source and social media alert, mapping, and analysis application solution,” which will be able to scrape material from social networks about emerging threats and then superimpose the information graphically on maps, giving FBI analysts a spatial sense of the threat landscape.