Today, Cheryl Bledsoe (Twitter.com/CherylBle), from Virtual EMA one of the pioneers of the VOST movement, held a webinar to discuss the Virtual Operations Support Team and how the team works.
In 2010, emergency managers were talking about how to harness the power of social media. They came up with the concept of the VOST to use social media “trusted agents” in diverse locations to help incident leaders have better information and complete web-based missions for emergency response.
As we know, social media helps you be more dynamic, listen to the public, share information and help incident command get intelligence.
Some web-based teams you may have heard of include Humanity Road or the American Red Cross’s digital engagement teams. But VOST is different.
The goal: Provide a snapshot of what is happening on social media as a member of the EOC or incident command. VOSTs can look for rumors and misinformation, threats and copycats, unsolicited volunteers, etc.
They curate and bring that information together and prepare narrative listening reports, filtering out the noise and clutter of social media.
Missions can be long (during a wildfire) or short.
Case study: Umpqua Community College shooting, October 2015
- 10-member VOST, but only used 2-3 people per day. Mission was active for 17 days.
- Evaluated spontaneous volunteers and fundraisers.
- Presidential visit
VOST training available
Where we would like to go in Utah:
- Conduct training: Virtual EMA does training on Fridays and Saturdays.
- Build our team to be capable identifying rumors and misinformation.
- Become skilled at curating social media messages and images.
- Understand and become proficient at the tools that are available.
- PIOs should consider becoming VOST team members.
If you would like to be part of UtahVOST1, contact Joe Dougherty, jdougherty@utah.gov.
Joe Dougherty, @PIO_Joe
Utah PIO Association 