During the seminar, each of us had to present on a natural disaster and look at the literature, and see how the disaster was presented in pop culture. I was assigned chemical plant accidents. During my presentation after I discussed what had been previously done and how chemical plants were presented in pop culture (I used the clip of the fire scene in Superman III), I also presented to my fellow colleagues how we could see how chemical plants were discussed online based on location through Trendsmap. Julie (PhD student from University of Colorado) was very interested in this particularly using it to look at weather trends.
After the seminar was done, Julie asked me if I would like to write a guest editorial for Weather and Society Watch,a publication focused on providing a forum to talk about various issues regarding the weather and to build a stronger and engaged community within the weather community. I thought this was a wonderful opportunity, and I began thinking about possible topics I could write about. Since there was such a strong interest in the geo-location based applications and mobile devices, I decided to focus on this for weather professionals in my piece. What I have seen so far in the media and other social media sources is that people are talking about the benefits and risks of geo-location applications and social media tools, but there really is not that many studies or pieces that have focused on how to use these specifically for weather professionals and how to address these issues proactively before a weather disaster and crisis. I was very excited and honored about this opportunity to work on a piece for them. 🙂
Even though my focus of my dissertation is on food safety crises and my previous research in crisis communications and social media has been more focused on the corporate side, it was really fun for me to work on this piece on the weather. I do believe that this is a great field to do research in, especially in crisis communications and social media. There are so many ways that weather professionals can serve as key social media influencers online on their various platforms to communicate safety information and messages in a disaster situation to their audiences, as well as listening and monitoring what their audiences are saying online. In other words, there are so many opportunities out there for both researchers and practitioners when it comes to the weather with social media and crisis communications. It is all very exciting! 🙂
Thank you again Emily and Julie for giving me this wonderful opportunity to write in your newsletter! 🙂 Hope you all are having a wonderful day!
Best Wishes,
Karen
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