Social media monitoring and practical risk management

Balkerne’s SmartResilience perpetually monitors a range of curated social media and news sites for the purposes of risk and resilience. The process involves the recognition of key words and phrases from postings made from sources judged to have different levels of verification, to identify and extract content of potential relevance. This content is then automatically reviewed to determine the risk in context, for example fire or flood and the geographical relevance. Once achieved, deduplication occurs, and the postings are attributed to a geospatial point and an event type.

Determined by customer risk tolerance and alerting requirements, specific thresholds can be configured within the SmartResilience Alert Manager Module by individual property, value at risk, event type and distance from the property. The result being that when a news or social media posting of an incident of a certain type occurs in the set vicinity of a customer property, an automated alert can be disseminated digitally to pre-nominated recipients. If the customer has invested in determining response plans for different event types, individual actions within these plans can also digitally be sent to nominated organisations and individuals. The most efficient use of time is achieved and the likelihood of successfully mitigating the consequences of the event are greater.

At 02:23 on 12th July 2021 London Fire Brigade tweeted details of the deployment of their resources in response to a fire on Morson Road, Enfield, North London.

At 02:30 a private Twitter account tweeted images from the site of the fire.

The left-hand image Tweeted includes a signpost with text. The image is pre-processed and normalized to enable the conduct of Optical Character Recognition, which generates two viable results, one being the term, ‘Navigation Park.’?

This term is added to the already provided search address details to achieve ‘Navigation Park, Morson Road, Enfield’ and using an Address LookUp API generates a distinct geospatial location and co-ordinates.?

In this incident, adjacent properties are operated by the Camden Town Brewery and Snowbird Foods. If either of these organisations had been SmartResilience users, they would automatically receive an alert of the fire incident to prompt appropriate actions.

SmartResilience identified a subsequent London Fire Brigade statement on the fire, issued at 04:02 12th July and posted by the website MyLondon. This provides further incident information that vehicles and two shipping containers had been alight. Information concerning the loss provides an important insurance claim starting point for any Insurance Broker, Insurer or Loss Adjustor.

Our approach to event detection and notification can combine technology and human action to empower organisations to manage risk to be as low as reasonably possible. We firmly believe that more and more organisations will choose to harness the value of real-time information as a fundamental element of corporate risk management and resilience.