Gauravonomics Blog

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Social media has often played an important role in on-ground reporting, coordinating relief efforts and fundraising during crisis situations, especially natural disasters like the South East Asia Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and the China Earthquake.

Social media is playing an important role again in the Haiti earthquake (Wikipedia/ Mahalo), in all three areas.

- Global Voices is tracking on-ground reporting from Carribean bloggers and Twitter users on its Haiti special coverage page.

- Ushahidi has set up a micro-site to invite direct reports from Haiti and also track tweets, photos, videos and news items related to the earthquake.

- The Crisis Commons wiki is curating a great list of resources related to the Haiti earthquake.

- CNN, NYT, BBC, NPR and Global Voices have created Twitter lists to track Haitians and relief organizations who are tweeting about the relief efforts. The #haiti hashtag is a firehose of tweets related to the earthquake.

- NPR, Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times and Reuters used the live blog format to cover the emerging situation in Haiti. CNN iReport is asking viewers to share their experience of the quake and post photos of missing loved ones.  Read More

I was quoted yesterday in an Associated Press story on the role of social media in Iran’s “Green Revolution”.

Gaurav Mishra, CEO of the social media research and strategy company 20:20 WebTech, said Twitter and Facebook do help get news out of Iran, but he warned against exaggerating their power to enact change.

“At best, these tools are catalysts, which are very important roles, but should not be overrated,” he said. “To expect Twitter and Facebook on their own to make a fundamental change in that situation is expecting too much.”

The story has also appeared in BusinessWeek, Forbes, Las Vegas Sun, Boston Globe, ABC7/ WJLA and NPR, amongst others.

I had earlier written about the irony of calling Iran’s “Green Revolution” a “Twitter Revolution” and was quoted in BusinessWeek, Forbes, BBC, MSNBC, Associated Press, and Worldfocus amongst others.

I was interviewed last week on NPR’s On The Media for a story on the role of citizen journalism in the Mumbai terrorist attack.

Here is the podcast –

– and here is the full text of the story –

The Twitter Wire Service
December 05, 2008
The Western media had few reporters on the ground in Mumbai during the three-day siege so many turned to services like Twitter to make sense of what was happening. Gaurav Mishra, an expert in social media, says a new ecosystem for crisis reporting emerged when western journalists mined twitter posts for details and twitter posters in turn linked to the best reports from the newspapers and TV networks.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Most of the western media relied on the Indian news channels, of which there are dozens, for footage as the attacks unfolded.

To Gaurav Mishra, an expert in social media, when the shooting started, outsiders were forced to rely on Twitter feeds, brief dispatches sent by text message to countless computers and cell phones. Mishra says the global power of Twitter was really put to the test in Mumbai.  Read More