In 2009, governments experimented with using social media to respond to a global crisis: the H1N1 pandemic (Smith, 2009). Research demonstrated that these early social media efforts displayed areas for improvement, including government agencies communicating inconsistent information via social and traditional media and releasing social media posts with sentences cut off because of Twitter’s 140 character limit at that time (Kim & Liu, 2012; Liu & Kim, 2011).
Liu, Brooke Fisher, Yan Jin, Lucinda Austin, Erica Kuligowski, and Camila Espina Young. 2020. "The Social-Meditated Crisis Communication (SMCC) Model: Identifying the Next Frontier." In Advancing Crisis Communication Effectiveness: Integrating Public Relations Scholarship with Practice, eds. Yan Jin, Bryan H. Reber, and Glen J. Nowak. New York: Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429330650