GNGTS 2013 - Atti del 32° Convegno Nazionale

After the 2012 seismic sequence, we started to use the INGVterremoti blog to release information on several other sequences that affected our country and other regions of the world. Moreover, we posted many articles on scientific projects and sometimes on specific issues raised by people’s questions and curiosity. The main categories today include: earthquakes in Italy; earthquakes in the world; seismic monitoring; several categories for each relevant sequence of the last year; education, and some others. To date, we are not allowing comments to our posts, only because our capacity of answering to the questions posed by the public is not so high yet. It is our will to open in the future, after a careful evaluation of pros and contraries and of the time needed. We will develop a unique channel for communicating to and with people from our social media, so that every argument can be useful for many others. Discussion and conclusion. It is well known that the distribution of proper and continuous scientific information on seismic activity and earthquake hazard is the first step to increase awareness and resilience of people. Besides the continuous activity that INGV carries out with schools and in the field, with campaigns such as those of the project Edurisk in more than ten years (AA.VV ., 2012), we recently increased our efforts on the web, and in particular on social media. In the last two years, we have increased the amount and quality of the information released to the public on earthquake-related topics. We had started in 2009 after the L’Aquila earthquake, when the terrible story of the process raised the problem of a proper and direct communication between scientists and society (Amato et al. , 2013). We believe that it is our duty to inform constantly the public about seismological research and seismic hazard, including the most recent developments of research, ongoing seismic activity, and explanations about earthquake in Italy and worldwide. This is what we are trying to do with the activity described in the present paper. Although all the data and information produced by our Institute are and have always been public, as witnessed by publications, web sites (see for instance http:// zonesismiche.mi.ingv.it, http://iside.rm.ingv.it , http://emidius.mi.ingv.it/CPTI11/, among many others), project deliverables, etc., we feel sometimes that this is not enough in order to share the knowledge broadly. The goal of the work on social media presented here is to increase the possibility for the public (not only generic public, but also journalists, local authorities, etc.) to access and understand the scientific contents of our research and monitoring. In addition, with the INGVterremoti social media platform we started a two-way communication with the public, even if at the moment Fig. 3 – Screen shot from the INGVterremoti blog, showing the static buttons (top), the video published during the Po Plain, Emilia, seismic sequence on the youtube channel (middle), the link to the recent posts (top roght), the tweets with the most recent earthquake locations (bottom right), and some other widgets with links etc. 347 GNGTS 2013 S essione 2.3