This session's focus is to assess the opportunities and challenges of social media for the broadcast meteorologist community. While social media have proven to have high impact when it comes to citizens sharing their observations, opinions and emotions, its role in hazard, emergency and crisis management has yet to be fully exploited. The main outcome of this session is a better understanding of the rapidly expanding social media environment in order to identify more efficient and effective ways to enable its use. Increasingly people are turning to social media, mobile technology and online outlets to share and seek information before, during and after severe weather events. Social media includes forms of information, visualization, and two-way communication technology being used within a cultural context through social interaction. The convergence of capabilities is creating opportunities such as empowering participation of new players and a younger demographic, while introducing new challenges such as who has the authoritative voice. Social media is altering situational awareness, the definition of local and stakeholder community, and the practice of broadcast meteorology. The emergent use of social media and the calls for a more weather-ready nation necessitates integration into a networked society. The community is now anyone on the network, not just those geographically defined by the weather event, including voluntary citizens able to provide real-time storm spotting, remotely-located professionals collaborating on decision support, or responders mobilizing action. Opportunities stem out of the application of new technological opportunities such as crowd mapping, visualization analytics, remote sensing, and the processing real time images of the local situation. Fed by growing broadband access, increased mobility, availability of richer text, imagery and mapping contents, as well as new communications platforms and applications there is an urgent need for the broadcast community to stay engaged.