Roberta Witty

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Roberta J. Witty
Research VP
11 years at Gartner
33 years IT industry

Roberta Witty is a research VP in Gartner Research, where she is part of the Compliance, Risk and Leadership group. Her primary area of focus is business continuity management and disaster recovery. Ms. Witty is the role specialty lead for… Read Full Bio

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Don’t Rely Only on Twitter for Emergency Notification

by Roberta J. Witty  |  August 6, 2009  |  2 Comments

The denial of service attack on Twitter should remind organizations that are automating their emergency call trees and crisis communications that a single end point isn’t good enough. Given the growth in social networking, more and more organizations are starting to think about leveraging these sites for emergency/crisis communications. But if it becomes your only end point, you risk not getting your message out when it is most needed – during a disaster.  In addition, no national telcom network has been tested for a regional disaster, so your phone messages might not get delivered either. Hence, build for emergency notification around multiple channels for best coverage. What is your organization doing to support best coverage?

2 Comments »

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2 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Michael Doerk   August 19, 2009 at 3:07 pm

    As you point out, any notification process that is dependent on a single communication methodology, wireless, wireline, email, or social media, may have serious problems communicating with its intended recipients during a crisis. An Organization shouldn’t avoid using social media as one of its crisis communication channels, just avoid depending on it to the exclusion of others.

  • 2 Trick or Tweet? Is Twitter a Viable Emergency Notification System? « SociaLies   November 15, 2009 at 10:40 pm

    [...] Don’t Rely Only on Twitter for Emergency Notification [...]