Building a Weather-Ready Nation Through Social Media: Developing Trust One Tweet at a Time

The power of social media to inform our society about extreme environmental hazards and the need to prepare for them is only now beginning to be realized. Building a Weather-Ready Nation requires a community that is ready, responsive and resilient to these events, but for that to happen, constituents need to have a base of knowledge that is built on trust. It is a basic tenet of risk communications that the message sender must be a trusted source with credibility, whose message is received with confidence. Within that framework, social media is among the most powerful of communications tools.

This presentation will focus on how social media can be used to effectively share potentially life-saving weather, water, and climate information. It will explore those aspects of social media that it make it one of the most powerful communications mediums of our time; likewise it will share some of the pitfalls that are inherent in such a powerful tool. The presentation will showcase real-world examples from the National Weather Service social media arsenal to make its case… that as credible information is shared by trustworthy sources, the circle of confidence gets ever wider.