Social Media for Supporting Emergent Groups in Crisis Management

The great importance of Social Media for our today's life causes an increasing use of internet-based platforms in crisis situations. Our work intends to show how so-called Emergent Groups, which arise as a result of crises, consist of private citizens and are not yet institutionalized organizations, can be supported by Social Media. At first, our literature review's objective is to define the term 'Emergent Group' and to outline their usage of Social Media as well as software-based requirements and suitable concepts to support such groups. A following quantitative and qualitative empirical analysis of a tornado crisis in the USA enables a closer look at especially virtual working Emergent Groups. Building on our literature review and empirical analysis, we discuss implications, derive further requirements and present a concept for the design of appropriate Social Software. We finally conclude by giving some potential research issues.