Social Media Innovation Flourishes During Thailand Floods

Byron Perry is the founder of hyperlocal and user-generated city website Coconuts Bangkok.

A wise man once said that necessity is the mother of invention, and indeed The Great Thailand Floods of 2011 have given rise to all sorts of new contraptions to deal with the life in the water – from raised tuk-tuks to water bottle doggy lifejackets.

Online innovation has also flourished during the floods, as people in Thailand have turned to social media for everything from sharing information to comic relief to serious calls for help.

With conflicting and confusing statements coming from Thailand’s politicians, social media has become even more crucial. In fact, a survey last week by Assumption University’s respected ABAC Poll Center found that social media had surpassed newspapers as a source of information with usage increasing from roughly 19 percent to 25 percent during the floods in Thailand.

Twitter has become probably the most used and trusted platform for flood info, with people who may have never heard of the site before signing up. The service reported a 20 percent increase in users in Thailand from 600,000 in September to 720,000 in October, according to the digital media agency McFiva that owns the advertising rights to Twitter in the country. The platform has achieved buzz throughout all sectors of Thai society, and stories are floating around of nervous mothers asking their teenage kids to join for flood updates.

In an interesting look at how Twitter users can govern themselves during a crisis, people came up with separate hash tags for Thai (#thaiflood) and English (#thaifloodeng) information. As the flooding approached Bangkok, influential tweeple like travel blogger Richard Barrow urged users to employ the correct hashtag so people wouldn’t have to sift through tweets in a language they didn’t understand. McFiva managing director Supachai Parchariyanon told the AFP last week that #thaiflood was currently the biggest hashtag in Thailand.

Social media has boosted the popularity of some celebs and made new faces famous during the flooding. Popular singer and jet ski champion (really) Jetrin Wattanasin regularly heads out on his Kawasaki to rescue or deliver food to flood victims – with video running of course – in response to tweets from his 172,00 followers. Environmentalist Sasin Chalermlab has gained a following for providing straightforward and honest information on his Youtube channel, on which the most popular video has been watched more than 440,000 times.

The most out-of-nowhere viral hit has been the Roo Su! Flood (“know and beat the flood”) video series on YouTube, made by two 26-year-old semi-employed filmmakers. The first video in the series aimed to simplify and bring home the billions of cubic-meters of of water that were bearing down on Bangkok in late October by equating them to cute Blue Whales. The whales have since become a popular culture phenomenon in Thailand, showing up everywhere from women’s nail art to Facebook profile pics, and the main video has been watched over a million times.

About Facebook, the platform has served as more of a forum for photo sharing and “we’re all in this together” camaraderie during the floods than real-time information. The community feature – pages “dedicated to a topic or experience that is owned collectively by the community connected to it,” as Facebook puts it – has seen the most use.

Probably the biggest community, the name of which can be loosely translated to “When the waters rise, we post”, launched on Oct. 6 and now has over 290,000 members sharing photos of their flooded backyards (sometimes with crocodiles loose in them), advice for house cleaning after the floods, and motivational messages.

Misinformation on social media has sometimes been a problem during the flooding, as alarming posts can quickly go viral and be passed around as fact. But there have been no reports of major false panics. Generally misinformation has involved photos on Facebook – like this one of another crocodile – that have proven to be somewhere other than Thailand.

For comic relief during the flooding, Tumblr has become the platform of choice for English speakers for its quick and easy functionality. The Crisis Chic photo blog was created by a group of fashion-minded expats with the motto “style shouldn’t go out the window, just ‘cause water’s coming in”, while Thai Flood Hacks celebrates the clever and funny inventions people have come up with to deal with floodwater.