SNOWpocalypse and Social Media

Holy SNOW Batman! With record breaking snowfall totals and incredible new white landscapes across the entire East Coast, it's no wonder that words like SNOWpocalypse, SNOWmaggeddon and snOMG have been coined across social networks to describe the recent weather conditions.

As people were stranded inside their homes, watching the white out from the comfort of their couches, many turned to social channels such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to document the historical weather as it happened.

This video, picked up by news stations across the country, shows the snow accumulation of over 30" in D.C. last weekend in just 30 seconds of time lapsed video footage.



Twitter became a crowd-sourced weather report for days at a time. Users reported on snow accumulation, road conditions, and personal accounts of the storm through tweets, pictures from their phones, and links.

The District of Columbia's Department of Transportation even set up an interactive map to show the status of snow clearing on all of it's city streets. It's pretty interesting to play with, check it out: http://snowmap.dc.gov/snowavl.asp

On Facebook, users began to organize massive snowball fights in major cities. They also posted many new pictures to document their use of the snow outside their front door as a beer cooler or the before and after effects on their front lawns, including many great snowmen.

Personally, I'm part of the stranded passengers meant to be on one of the 5,700 flights cancelled this past Wednesday. With plans to return from vacation last Sunday night, I've had my flight cancelled and rebooked four times since last weekend. My itinerary was impacted by both sets of storms and thanks to Southwest's diligent customer service, I will finally be returning home a full seven days after expected. Truly though, Southwest has been amazing about alerting me to the cancellations over 24 hours in advance in all cases, and has even proactively called me to fix a mistake in my reservation. I couldn't ask for more from an airline (other than open airports) when I'm stranded far from home. I was happy to tweet their praises to @SouthwestAir, and got a personal thank you from their team for doing so.

After all of the media hype and most East Coast'ers ready to be rid of all things white and frozen, some have dubbed it all just a bunch of SNOverkill.

I think we're all ready for a little sunshine!