Our research into the use of social media for crisis communication, which produced last year’s report on the use of Twitter during the 2011 Queensland floods and a variety of other outputs (on the Christchurch earthquakes, Hurricane Sandy, and other events), continues at pace, even if there haven’t been a great many updates about it on this site over the last few months.

In particular, we’re involved in an important new research partnership with the Queensland Department of Community Safety and the Eidos Institute, as part of an ARC Linkage project that examines the appropriate strategies for the use of social media by emergency services during crisis events. To kickstart this project, Eidos Institute is organising the second Social Media in Times of Crisis conference, following on from the successful 2011 event which focussed mainly on the then still very recent Queensland floods – and registrations for this event are now open. Please join us – there’s a raft of high-profile speakers already lined up.

The conference takes place on 4 April 2013 at the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane – here’s me talking about the event itself, and about the importance of this field of research:

Interview with Associate Professor Axel Bruns, QUT from Eidos Institute on Vimeo.