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Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific

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Bushfires 2010 Online: What did we learn from last time?

February 23, 2010

Last year I wrote about the online response to the Victorian bushfires and how Australians used the Internet to find out important information about this devastating crisis. In this post, I want to explore if there has been any ‘learned behaviour’ in the community about being prepared for environmental disasters as reflected in their search patterns.

The below chart appears to indicate that online users were quick to react online to the event last year, but the volume of searches around ‘bushfires’ this year is relatively small in comparison.

It is encouraging however to see in the chart below, that the types of searches around bushfires that I covered last year, namely, Appeal, Education, General, Informational, Services have had various ebbs and flows - most likely in response to some of the offline campaigns that have been run by the various state authorities. There has been some prominence around ‘education’ related searches in the past few weeks, indicating some desire by users to be equipped with knowledge about bushfire safety.

Who is being strategic about online crisis management?

Our data can also illustrate the types of websites that are receiving traffic on bushfires, to help determine which organisations are being effective in getting online community traction. The NSW Rural Fire Service received the most traffic on ‘bushfires’ for the past 12 weeks, reflected in the table below:

Other government groups are using tactics such as pay-per-click to get traffic (accounting for 2.5% of clicks from ‘bushfires’ searches), resulting in their appearance amongst the top websites.

For government and community organisations, both short-term tactics should be used to meet immediate information needs (e.g. PPC and Display), while long-term campaigns (e.g. SEO and Social Media) should be used to mitigate complacency and instigate cultural change around bushfire awareness in Australia.

Tweet Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 09:09 AM | (0)
In Categories Community | Government