What to do if an earthquake strikes? LINE is the answer

Posted on February 7th, 2013 by Adam Acar

We recently conducted a survey among college students and found that LINE is their most favorite social media platform. Most interestingly when we asked what they would do if there was an earthquake, they listed LINE as their preferred type of communication channel after the phone, email and the internet. This is a topic I will discuss in my upcoming book Social Media and Japan.

QUESTION: If there was an earthquake with the magnitude of 6.8 that hit this school and caused some minor damage (presume that you are safe and there’s no serious damage in your building). How would you use the new communication tools at that moment? Please rank these choices in terms of your priority. Your first choice should be listed as the 1st and your last choice should be ranked as the 7th.

Item
Phone call
Email
Internet (search, browse, etc.)
Line (message, call, etc.)
Facebook (update, message, search, etc.)
Twitter (update, message, search, etc.)
Mixi (update, message, search, etc.)
Total Respondents: 83
Score is a weighted calculation. Items ranked first are valued higher than the following ranks, the score is the sum of all weighted rank counts.


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Adam Acar

Associate Professor at KCUFS
profile Associate professor of communication at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies & lecturer of marketing strategy at IUJ. Adam started writing about social media as early as 2005 and is the author of several sns studies including "the antecedents of social networking behavior" and "Twitter usage during the Great Tohoku earthquake." Adam Acar is also the director of Marketing Competition Japan, the first All-English social media focused competition in Japan.

Tags: Japan // 2 Comments »

  • karl

    hmmm… This needs clarifications.

    * Phone call
    * Internet (search, browse, etc.) == Line, Facebook, Twitter, Mixi, Email

    So not sure what you really meant by “Internet”

  • http://twitter.com/adamacar adam

    The respondents were asked to rank these mediums in the order of importance. We didn’t have to put the parentheses but it was just to make the terms clearer for the survey takers. Internet (you can use it to search information, browse the web sites of news channels and etc). Maybe we chose the wrong wording for the internet but I assume most people understood it the same way. To my great surprise email was #2, perhaps users thought it was the phone mail, an advanced version of sms, that is common in Japan.

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