Weather and Society Watch
Guest Editorial

Just Talking About the Weather—Social Networks and the Weather Enterprise
by Nate Johnson*

The lexicographers at Oxford University Press recently analyzed 1.5 million posts on one online “social networking” service, distilling out the most frequently used words. Given the impact of the weather on our daily lives—and the subsequent impact on our daily conversations—it should come as no surprise that weather-related terms featured prominently in the top 500: cold, hot, rain, sun, and weather all made the list [1].

In other words, if people are talking, chances are they’re talking about the weather. That’s regardless of whether they’re making small talk at the bus stop or chatting with friends online. The rapid growth of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and others has enabled conversations about every topic under the sun, including the sun itself, to go beyond the bus stop, the elevator, and perhaps even e-mail. These sites, along with localized communities, such as WRAL-TV’s GoLo (out of Raleigh, North Carolina), allow users to share their weather with others from next door to a world away, in text, pictures, and videos—all in near-real time.

Clearly, the weather enterprise has a lot to gain from participating in these conversations, from the real-time exchange of pictures and information during severe weather to using these networks as a societal impacts research tool. Although the potential is great, dozens of questions do arise about how best to engage these growing communities.

Some Basics

It may not have been the first of these new social media sites, but Facebook is one of the fastest growing. It began in 2004 in the dorm room of Mark Zuckerberg, who originally intended it to help fellow students identify classmates at Harvard. It quickly spread to other schools and has since continued to grow into the largest online community in the world [2].

The Facebook experience begins with creating a user profile, including contact information, favorite books and movies, and even a college or work history. Then, users find other friends through the service by looking up e-mail addresses, searching on common interests, or connecting through other friends. Users can then share pictures, video clips, and status updates—brief blurbs about what one is thinking or doing at a given moment—with their Facebook friends. They can also share links from other Web sites on Facebook, as well. According to Web-sharing service AddToAny, sharing items via Facebook is now more popular than sharing via e-mail [3].

Facebook may have been built to answer the question, “Who’s sitting behind me in history class?” On the other hand, Twitter is all about “What are you doing?” The “microblogging” service asks its users to answer that question, but with a twist—the answer must fit within 140 characters. At the surface, this short format encourages brevity and pithiness, but it has had an interesting side effect: creativity.

The 140-character limit has inspired a great deal of innovation, with complementary services popping up to allow users to share their exact locations and links to pictures and other Web sites, among other things. The combination of the length limitation, the availability of these related applications, and the proliferation of camera-enabled mobile devices has empowered users to share—in real time—eyewitness accounts of breaking news events worldwide, including severe weather and breaking news events. So important an outlet was Twitter during the turmoil surrounding the recent elections in Iran that the U.S. State Department urged Twitter to delay system maintenance that would have cut off access to the service for Iranians disputing the election results. [4]

Who’s Already Here?

Facebook and similar sites such as LinkedIn (focusing on resume sharing and professional users), MySpace (reorganizing itself as an entertainment portal), and others continue to show impressive growth, with Facebook leading the way. The service now claims more than 250 million users worldwide, more than doubling from 100 million in less than 11 months [5,6].

Twitter’s growth is even more remarkable. According to Nielsen Online, Twitter posted an astonishing year-to-year growth rate of 1,928% through June of this year. The service that started “as a side project” in the spring of 2006 now boasts 21 million unique users per month [2,7].

These growth rates are more impressive when you consider who comprises those statistics, and at least one recent study suggests a rather large percentage of users are on at least one of these social media sites. In a recent study in the United Kingdom, comScore found that some 80% of British Internet users used a social media Web site, spending an average of 4.6 hours per month each.

Perhaps more telling are usage statistics of various networks during high-impact weather events. During the Inauguration Day snowstorm of 2009, viewers of WRAL-TV in Raleigh and members of their GoLo.com community posted more than 2,350 pictures and 80 videos, far and above the normal number of such submissions [8]. These images were shared online and some were also broadcast during WRAL’s continuing coverage of the snowstorm. Usage of Twitter also increases markedly during high-impact weather events, especially those affecting population centers.

Power of Social Media

Much of the power of social media comes from two related sources: the ability to update and share information instantaneously and the interconnectedness of users across the network. This allows information to be put into the network in near-real time and for it to be shared just as quickly from one set of friends, to another, and so on. In other words, an individual can snap a picture, post it to a social network, and watch it spread well beyond his or her own contact networks very quickly.

Naturally, the idea of additional sources of real-time data from within or near severe or extreme weather is very attractive. Where storm spotters use reports to paint a picture of a storm, social media users can post an actual picture, or even video, of the same storm. The true nature of a storm’s aftermath can become clear almost immediately, too, allowing emergency managers and first responders to direct resources to the greatest need.

This information continues to have value long after the storm has passed. Pictures and videos can be used to identify damage patterns and classify storm damages. Researchers are also using videos from various sources on the Internet to understand why people make poor decisions during severe weather. Those same images can be used in future public awareness campaigns, showing the damage storms can cause and the consequences of being unprepared.

Beyond simply “listening”, the weather enterprise has a great deal to add to the conversation.
Numerous segments already share time-sensitive watch and warning information via social media, often reaching people away from traditional sources like TV and radio. Preparedness campaigns could also make effective use of social networks, sharing “best of” or “worst of” pictures and videos as education tools. Like everything else, once initially shared, content is often shared again and again. For example, the video-taped aftermath of an encounter between a tornado and a freight train in January 2008 was posted on YouTube, has been viewed there more than a million times, and has spread to dozens of other websites. [9, 10].

“Weather” to Jump In

Social networks and the information that passes across them do present some challenges for the enterprise. For starters, cultivating a social network can take some work, and monitoring multiple networks, especially during active weather, can be very time-intensive. In addition, anytime we solicit information from the public, there is the potential for misuse or even intentional abuse, including phony reports. In spite of the issues involved, however, the recent explosion in social media points toward a growing potential for all sides of the weather enterprise to communicate with each other and with the public in a new and exciting way.

With a proper strategy, these networks can serve both as a way to receive quality information and a way to share potentially life-saving information with the public. All involved should thoughtfully determine in which conversations they will participate and have a strategy for doing so. Furthermore, the members of the weather enterprise should share those strategies with each other in an effort to provide coherency and consistency of message. Ferree and coauthors suggest that the National Weather Service could even play a role in encouraging use of social media, as well as proposing standard notation for users to adopt to facilitate the two-way sharing of information [11].

The bottom line

Just like at the bus stop or on the elevator, people will continue to talk about the weather online and through social media, and these conversations will go on whether we participate or not. The weather enterprise has a fantastic opportunity to both learn from and educate by engaging these communities. All we need to do is what seems natural—talk about the weather.

*Nate Johnson (@nsj on Twitter) is a meteorologist and executive producer with WRAL-TV in Raleigh, N.C. He also serves on the station’s Social Media Task Force and operates or helps manage a number of station-wide accounts, including @wralweather. He is also an active Weather and Society*Integrated Studies (WAS*IS) participant—he attended the 2008 summer workshop in Boulder—and is a member of the 2009 WAS*IS summer workshop advisory committee.

References

[1] http://nerdworld.blogs.time.com/2009/06/08/the-500-most-frequently-used-words-on-twitter/, accessed July 2009.

[2] http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/social-media-stats-myspace-music-growing-twitters-big-move/, accessed July 2009.

[3] http://mashable.com/2009/07/20/facebook-sharing-data/, accessed July 2009.

[4] http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssTechMediaTelecomNews/idUSWBT01137420090616, accessed July 2009.

[5] http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/7/Nine_Out_of_Ten_25-34_Year_Old_U.K._Internet_Users_Visited_a_Social_Networking_Site_in_May_2009, accessed July 2009.

[6] http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=106860717130, accessed July 2009.

[7] http://twitter.com/about, accessed July 2009.

[8] John Conway, director of Creative Services, WRAL.com, personal communication.

[9] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azV5bC2br-Q, accessed July 2009.

[10] http://www.google.com/search?q=”train+vs.+tornado”, accessed July 2009.

[11] Ferree, J. T., J. L. Demuth, G. Eosco, and N. S. Johnson, 2009: The increasing role of social media during high-impact weather events. Presented at the American Meteorological Society’s 37th Conference of Broadcast Meteorology, Portland, Oregon, July 22-25, 2009

Photo credit:

Thick ice coats plants the Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas, during the 2007 AMS annual meeting. See p. 2 for research about this unusual winter storm. (Photo courtesy of Kenneth E. Kehoe)