Kyle Nelson, Senior Dispatcher for Pitkin County, Colorado Regional Emergency Dispatch Center, and information technology guru, talks with Eric Singer about must-have Google Chrome Add-ons for Public Information Officers (PIOs) to assist in media monitoring efforts.

Kyle suggestes PIOs include the following tools into their toolkits:

• InVid is a good staple to have in your PIO tool box for analyzing and extracting metadata from videos.
• RevEye is a multi-platform reverse image search extension you should investigate and use in your information gathering.
• Better Tweet Deck is an enhancer extension for the Tweet Deck tool which includes emojis and thumbnails from more than 25 plus websites. 

Kyle also told Eric that trends to look for in social media monitoring include more digi-vols or digital volunteers to help PIOs handle the workload as monitoring social media increases and VOSTs or Virtual Operation Support Teams which the PAST Fusion Cell has also talked about in previous classes.  

There could also be a soon-to-bloom, social media monitoring business model to help PIOs struggling with shrinking government resources to pay for full-time help to do that function. Kyle believes that new companies could be cashing in on, on-call and contract social media monitoring services during major events and possibly sunny day situations. He sees this as a very cost-effective way to get the monitoring services needed by PIOs and their agencies if they don’t have a budget for a full-time social media staffer.