Last Friday, The Weather Channel Companies (TWCC) launched The Weather Channel Social, a partnership with Twitter that allows consumers to see real-time tweets and breaking weather forecasts on TWC’s mobile, television, and Web platforms. According to B&C Mobile, “the launch is one of the most ambitious attempts ever made to integrate Twitter into multiplatform programming by a cable programmer.”
U.S. Twitter users already send approximately 200 weather-related tweets per minute (on an average day), and significant weather events can produce over two million tweets a day. According to Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s director of content and programming, “We’re excited to make tweets an integral part of weather reports on television, online and mobile. By surfacing these conversations and providing human context around factual weather information, The Weather Channel Social brings weather alive.”
The Weather Channel Social includes:
weather.com
- the Social module will display real-time, curated tweets that are relevant to the weather in a particular location
- each city will also have a dedicated local Social page with a complete feed of real-time, weather-related tweets and other TWC social and user-generated content
- users can tweet their own observations
The Weather Channel’s iPhone app
- will feature tweets on all of its local forecast pages with a complete feed of real-time Twitter posts from The Weather Channel Social page
- users can also participate in the conversation by tweeting directly from the app
The Weather Channel (TV)
- real-time tweets from Social will be integrated into live programming to improve its coverage
- viewers will be able to participate in the weather coverage
- The Weather Channel has created 220 custom local Twitter feeds that provide localized forecasts every three hours for cities with populations of 100,000 and above
Messaging from sponsor Citi is heavily integrated into The Weather Channel Social, and the application uses Wiredset’s Trendrr social curation and conversation analysis technology.
This partnership with Twitter will allow The Weather Channel “to tell a complete story of how a weather event is making its impact locally,” as reported by the International Business Times. Given how often Twitter users already comment on the weather, it seems fairly certain that this “new social media collaboration” will be embraced by users.
