Flood Twittering: A Marketing and Public Policy Perspective Through the Lens of Actor-Network Theory

Abstract

Twitter could be claimed as part of the critical social network media, which can respond promptly to any event in real time. Recently, many scholars investigated various aspects of Twitter in disaster management such as the behavior of Twitter users during an earthquake (Qu et al., 2011; Tanaka, Sakamoto, and Matsuka, 2012). By monitoring tweets from an event in real time, each Twitter user becomes a sensor (as reporting the situation by tweets) that targets events such as the earthquake in Japan, which could be identified and observed immediately with details and specific location from beginning to end (Sakaki, Okazaki, and Matsuo, 2010).