Social Media Analytics and Reporting Toolkit (SMART)

Advances in technology have made it possible for social media platforms to export real-time data feeds. These feeds capture location- and time-stamped information that can increase situational awareness of local events. Every day up to 500 million tweets are sent on the Twitter platform, sharing a tremendous amount of publicly available data. First responders require new methods to monitor topics of interest, identify trends and anomalies and deal with the data volume and its dynamic nature. To address this technology gap, DHS S&T funded the development of the Social Media Analytics and Reporting Toolkit (SMART) software to provide an interactive web-accessible system that provides users with aggregated social media data for analysis and visualization to help first responders gain improved situational awareness from Twitter feeds without the persistent attention of the user. DHS S&T’s National Urban Security Technology Laboratory (NUSTL) conducted a technology demonstration of the SMART software with emergency responders. This report provides results and feedback on the tool’s usability, interface and overall usefulness to first responders.