Hurricane center tries out Facebook, Twitter
The Commerce Department’s National Hurricane Center kicked off the start of the 2011 hurricane season June 1 with a Facebook and Twitter social media presence for the first time and has already attracted thousands of followers and hundreds of comments.
The center describes its social networking activity as experimental for now, even as it is expanding those roles.
“As we come up on the eve of the start of the Atlantic hurricane season, [this is] just another reminder of how we're handling questions posted to Facebook,” center officials said on their Facebook page May 31. “We're going to field as many general questions as possible, but we can't effectively use this forum to provide weather forecasts.” The center referred readers to hurricanes.gov for that purpose.
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Ed Rappaport, the center’s deputy director, also recently addressed
social media’s possibilities for improving the agency’s disaster
warnings and communications with the public, but he said there are
uncertainties about its effectiveness.
Social media is “certainly an option, but we need to know more about
what is required to get an effective public response to the threat of a
hurricane,” Rappaport said in a June 1 statement. “There are
sociological and science factors involved. It's hard to accurately
forecast what the weather will do. It's harder to accurately forecast
what people will do. We need to keep working to learn more about both
processes.”
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather
Service operates the hurricane center in Miami. It is listed on its
Facebook page as the NOAA NWS National Hurricane Center.
The center launched its Facebook page in January as a pilot project.
“Facebook is an experiment for the National Hurricane Center,” officials
wrote in their introductory message. “We're interested in learning how
we can make it work best, both for NHC and for you.”
Similarly, the center’s two new Twitter feeds — one for the Atlantic Ocean and another for the Pacific — were launched June 1 to coincide
with the start of the hurricane season. The agency described them as a
prototype effort.
“The National Hurricane Center presence on Twitter is a prototype to
help decision-makers and the public receive notifications of the very
latest on hazardous tropical weather systems,” according to a statement
on the center’s website.
As of June 3, the center’s Facebook page had 17,331 followers. Its
Atlantic Ocean Twitter feed had 2,344 followers, and the Pacific Ocean
feed had 229 followers.
Center officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.