I. Background
The Presidential Communications Development and Strategic Planning Office (PCDSPO) and the Office of the Presidential Spokesperson (PCDSPO-OPS) have used and have promoted the use of unified hashtags to monitor, track, and consolidate information before, during, and after a natural disaster strikes. This report is an overview of this. It concludes with an assessment of the effectiveness of using unified hashtags.
The Official Gazette and PCDSPO Twitter accounts are used to coordinate information dissemination, relief, and rescue efforts with netizens, the private media, and concerned agencies of the government (who also operate on Twitter). Personal Twitter accounts of Presidential Spokesperson Edwin Lacierda, Undersecretary Manolo Quezon, and Deputy Presidential Spokesperson Abigail Valte also actively promoted the responsible use of the hashtags.
The following are the official Twitter accounts of the Official Gazette and PCDSPO, as well as the officials of the OPS and the PCDSPO who are considered public figures, and who have Twitter handles with large followings:
· Official Gazette - @govph
· PCDSPO - @pcdspo
· Sec. Edwin Lacierda - @dawende
· Usec. Manuel L. Quezon III - @mlq3
· Usec. Abigail Valte - @abi_valte
II. Origin
We recognized that Twitter is a useful platform for disseminating government advisories, esp. to private media organizations, which can disseminate a message across media, social strata, and geographic location with speed and efficiency.
Twitter is also useful for collecting information from the ground, especially at times of disaster in places where a relatively large portion of the population is online (i.e., the capital).
The hashtags #rescuePH and #reliefPH were first used in August 2012, when the country was experiencing storm-enhanced monsoon rains. These were initiatives from the private sector. Enough people were using the hashtags to make them trend for days. Eventually, we adopted the hashtags in our tweets for disseminating government advisories, and for collecting reports from the ground. We also ventured into creating new hashtags, and into convincing media outlets to use unified hashtags.