The Federal Emergency Management Agency's relationship with social media seems destined to be like your granny and Facebook—she might set up an account, but she’s not going to use it right and all the while she’ll be certain it’s going to crash her computer and steal her identity.

That, at least, is the tentative and curmudgeonly gist of a recently released Congressional Research Service report titled, Social Media and Disasters: Current Uses, Future Options, and Policy Considerations. The report was created in response to congressional curiosity about “whether FEMA can move beyond using social media for informational purposes and apply it to improving disaster response and recovery capabilities.” The answer is decidedly Magic 8 Ball-like: "Reply hazy, try again."

The report examines two types of social media use by local and international emergency management agencies. It differentiates “passive” dissemination from a more “systematic” approach that might include issuing official communiqués and warnings, receiving requests for assistance, and monitoring the public's posts to enhance situational awareness.

“Many of these applications remain speculative, while others uses remain in their infancy,” author Bruce R. Lindsay writes. “Consequently, most emergency management organizations have confined their use of social media to the dissemination of information.”

Although the report points out a variety of promising ways FEMA might use social media (creating maps and damage estimates from user-submitted data, delivering targeted recovery assistance, and mobilizing first responders), it concludes with warnings about socially driven misinformation, use of media to mislead officials, and technological limits.

Add the uncertainty about the costs of administering the largely "free" technologies, and the report reaches this conclusion:

“It could be argued that the positive results of social media witnessed thus far have been largely anecdotal and that the use of social media is insufficiently developed to draw reliable conclusions on the matter. By this measure, it should therefore be further examined and researched before being adopted and used for emergencies and disasters.”

In an area where not only advances, but also adoption, are lightening fast, the wait-and-see approach might be a tad behind the times.

For instance, the CRS report comes on the heels of a Red Cross survey looking at how people used social media during disasters. Not only did the 2,057-person survey indicate that social media sources rank just below television and radio as an emergency information source, it also found that 80 percent of people thought national emergency responders should monitor social media feeds and respond promptly.

“Social media is becoming an integral part of disaster response,” Wendy Harman, American Red Cross director of social strategy, stated in a press release. “During the record-breaking 2011 spring storm season, people across America alerted the Red Cross to their needs via Facebook. We also used Twitter to connect to thousands of people seeking comfort, and safety information to help get them through the darkest hours of storms.”

Queensland Police took a similar tack during historic 2010-2011 flooding. Their take-home from the experience (which we reported on in DR 572) was emergency agencies should not only use social media vigorously, they shouldn’t hobble its use with policy and protocols.

The CRS report also comes at a time of unprecedented social media adoption by FEMA at the hands Craig Fugate, who is known to practice what he tweets. His message, given at a May 5, 2011, Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery and Intergovernmental Affairs hearing, is that if you want to reach the people, you’ve got to speak their language.

“Social media is imperative to emergency management because the public uses these communication tools regularly,” he wrote. “Rather than trying to convince the public to adjust to the way we at FEMA communicate, we must adapt to the way the public communicates by leveraging the tools that people use on a daily basis. We must use social media tools to more fully engage the public as a critical partner in our efforts.”