As in emergency management, social media is becoming a growing consideration for business continuity and continuity of operations planning. The topic was discussed at a recent meeting of the National Emergency Management Association in Washington D.C. At NEMA's mid-year conference, a whole day of discussions was dedicated to the role of SM in emergency management and BCP/COOP.

The consensus, reached by emergency managers and business continuity planners, is that it is now a "smart practice" to include SM in BCP and COOP programs.

Some applications come quickly to mind:

1. for alerting and notification purposes: some smaller businesses and organizations might not have the resources to have full-fledged BCP/COOP alert and notification systems (such as those provided by Sipera, Everbridge, CloudBCM and Sendwordnow, to name a few). Twitter might then be an economical and effective way to manage alerts and notifications for key stakeholder groups (such as employees) though the management of Twitter lists.

2. As in emergency management, there is a growing trend in the use of social media by different stakeholder groups to provide a wide variety of data. This new way of gathering information can prove to be very useful in performing up-to-date business impact analysis or establishing revised recovery time objectives. (for some quick BCP lexicon help, see here).

3. Communications tool: as with emergency management, social media can provide your organization with prompt and effective communication channels. The benefit of using cloud-based systems includes a channel which is outside of your network and thus unlikely to be affected by the same business disruption that's affecting you.

This cloud based aspect is key and is a factor of improved resilience in itself.

Another key point to remember is that BCP/COOP programs are on the same continuum as emergency management. Frankly, why not look at home and individual preparedness as family BCP efforts? So, it's logical to say that the same obstacles that stand in the way of generalized adoption of social media in emergency management, are faced by BCP practitioners as well. They include:

• Many still consider social media a fad. Particularly if they focus on the platforms currently popular (Facebook and Twitter for example) and not what they mean: ability to exchange info and share perceptions instantly.

• Many Chief Information Officers and other technology expects consider social media too great a vulnerability in terms of cyber-security. A sound risk management and effective guidelines program should help in that regard.

• Data validation: for many, the info provided by stakeholders through social media remains a bit untrustworthy. But really, is that much different from what is conveyed through other means, the 9-1-1 system or through email for example?

• Resilience: many consider that there are inherent weaknesses in key social media platforms. Recent history (Japan, New Zealand and Australia disasters) and a whole series of new studies would suggest otherwise however. In fact, more and more BCP practitioners see SM as tools for increasing resilience.

Again, we hope that this post will lead to some interesting comments.