GNGTS 2013 - Atti del 32° Convegno Nazionale

available (in 1 to 4 minutes) and sent to Dipartimento di Protezione Civile (DPC) by the INGV seismologists on shift via telephone, SMS and email. However, we do not send the automatic information to the public yet, due to possible false alarms and subsequent problems for uncontrolled spread of incorrect news. At present, many newspapers and press agencies use INGVterremoti tweets to get and spread rapid and authoritative information about ongoing seismic activity. Tests are in progress since last year to define if and how to send automatic locations to the public. The number of followers of our twitter channel recently exceeded 100,000. Since the beginning of the service, the followers have been increasing continuously with a constant trend and sudden jumps associated with the main earthquakes of the last two years (in Italy and worldwide) (Fig. 2). A total of about 13,000 tweets was released up to date, one for each earthquake in Italy with magnitude equal to or greater than 2.0. The success of the INGVterremoti twitter channel is based on its simplicity, continuity, and effectiveness with respect of people’s need. Each tweet contains a location that is mapped easily on every PC or mobile device. In the fall of 2012 INGVterremoti won the Italian “Macchianera award” as “most useful twitter”, nominated and voted by people of the net. The analysis of how the information was searched and spread during the 2012 Po Plain seismic sequence is presently in progress (Comunello et al. , 2013). This analysis will provide a quantitative evaluation of Twitter activity, including tweet volume over time, distribution of activity across users as well as useful information to understand the specific communication patterns taking place on social media during an emergency, with regard to information spread and influence dynamics. Facebook INGVterremoti. Soon after the L’Aquila earthquake in 2009, the INGV Bologna section started to post the revised earthquakes locations on the Facebook page “Terremoto Oggi”. It was a semi-official, experimental page fed by the INGV seismic monitoring system, that had a good success in terms of “friends” (more than 22,000 in 2012). Since it was based on a volunteer basis, it was not always possible to interact with people asking information, as expected by Facebook users. However, as for twitter, the request of correct information from the web was accomplished rather fast and continuously. In the last year, we decided to close the “Terremoto Oggi” account and start with a new one called INGVterremoti, to be consistent with the other social media of the earthquake information at INGV. Today, the Facebook page has about 12,000 friends in constant grow. We published on it several posts (up to 10 per day) mostly on earthquakes just happened, but also with updates from the blog and the youtube channel. We answer to some of the questions raised on FB, even if not yet in a continuous and timely mode. Youtube.com/INGVterremoti. The youtube channel INGVterremoti was launched in February 2010 as an experimental scientific video channel, in order to test whether this medium could work as a tool to increase people’s awareness and curiosity about earthquake science and risk reduction. A similar initiative was already known to be working and successful at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) since 2009. As for the USGS, our main goal was to inform people about the ongoing seismic activity in Italy and around the world, to describe the results of scientific research in seismology, and to increase the knowledge of seismic hazard (Amato et Fig. 1 – Structure of the INGVterremoti social media platform. The numbers are approximate and updated at the end of September 2013. 344 GNGTS 2013 S essione 2.3