Never Stop Learning
The great thing about the social media space is that you learn new things practically every day. On Thursday of this week, I was working with Collin Condray who runs the retail businesses at Collective Bias on some projects and we were monitoring the impending ice storm marching across Oklahoma and getting ready to give Northwest Arkansas a big “how, YOU doin”.
As we were consuming multiple streams of digital and social data we came across a collaborative Google map called the Oklahoma Ice Map. Collin and I explored the map for an hour or so and marveled at the simplicity of a crowd-sourced tool to deal with natural disasters. The Map was created by Trey Brown and collaborator Sid Burgess. I thought the idea was brilliant in it’s simplicity to have people share storm info as it happened from their point of view.
Combined with social platforms such as Flickr, location based services like Whrrl and community generated content, the tool really became a useful resource to track road conditions, power outages, school closings etc. Additionally, it could be added back to all of the inputs via a simple link to create a larger loop of information. We were hooked! Collin and I started about building a map for Arkansas and began to populate it with info we found on Twitter (I imagined we could create some sort of combined input but that’s beyond my simple technical skills).
Within minutes, people began adding content to the map. Jay Thornton then created a social aggregation site to tie in the Twitter stream for hashtag #nwaicestorm10, Google News, pictures and links to school closings.
Social Aggregation has a multitude of uses some with heavy utility and some that are just fun and entertaining. We’ve built several social aggregation sites for our clients to date including Ubisoft’s Your Shape, Colgate’s Wisp and Cover Girl’s Smoky Eye Look. Thanks to the input of the Collective Bias Social Fabric™ community, each execution builds on the last to become a reflection of the contributors.
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I found this site to be a great tool to pull folks together in a collaborative manner during a tenuous time which I have to believe helped to elevate stress and worries. misery loves company!
That is SO cool!
I’m glad other areas are finding what was created during a time of need in OK useful and adapting the concept for their own use!