Crowdsourcing a social bushfire response

When January's North Stradbroke Island fires threatened to spread via ember attacks, Redland City Council turned to social media for on-the-ground reports to help direct emergency services and stop the fires from spreading.

Natural disasters such as fire and flood have seen Queensland authorities such as Redland City Council lead the way in integrating their social media channels. During the fires, the council's communications team fed social media reports of ember attacks into the Guardian disaster management software, ensuring fire crews stopped the fire from spreading.

Such valuable "crowd-sourced intel" is the result of a decision to actively embrace social media as a customer service channel rather than simply a community notice board, says Matt Murray, senior digital communications adviser with Redland City Council.

"Two years ago social media was a really neglected comms channel in our council, so we started taking customer service requests," Murray says. "When people realised that we were listening and replying they starting to hit us with all kinds of issues, from 'hey, there's a tree down in my street' to 'my bins weren't collected this week'."

"Today we're getting 50 to 60 customer service requests per month via social media about absolutely everything. Our social media team passes those requests to the appropriate internal people, who log them and then let us know the result so we can respond."

Murray's 'social media team' is in fact the communications team, himself and council communications officer Julia Mackerras who have both taken on 'digital engagement' as a growing part of their day-to-day roles. As the importance of social media grows, the plan is to hand over the customer service element to the customer call centre, which is better resourced to deal with them.

"Right now we're like a go-between. If we get a pothole report, for example, we don't send it to the customer service team; we send it directly to our city infrastructure group," Murray says.

"When it's an unusual request it can take us quite some time to ask around the organisation and find the best person to deal with it. We don't have access to the customer service system and their scripts, so something the call centre could resolve in a few minutes can take us much longer."

This increasing focus on social media has met resistance from some parts of the organisation, Murray says, due to the impression that social media users expect to jump the traditional customer service queue.

"People within council sometimes mistake our asking for an immediate response – even if it's not a full answer – as asking them to put it to the top of the queue. So it looks like people on social media are queue-jumping the people contacting us through other more traditional channels," Murray says.

"That's absolutely not what it's about at all. We take their request and give them some form of feedback, but how the relevant business unit prioritises that request in their system is up to them. Reassuring people that we're aware of the situation is often more important than an immediate resolution. We don't want to treat them differently. The whole idea is to stop treating social media as a special case and to incorporate it as a legitimate communication channel with your local council." – Adam Turner