Identification

Title

Getting the word out, rain or shine: The impact of message features and hazard context on message passing online

Abstract

Networked social media provide governmental organizations, such as the National Weather Service (NWS), the opportunity to communicate directly with stakeholders over long periods of time as a form of online engagement. Typologies of engagement include aspects of message content that provide information, contribute to community building, and inspire action and aspects of message microstructural features that facilitate interaction and dialogue, such as directed messages, hashtags, and URLs. Currently, little is known regarding the effect of message strategies on behavioral outcomes, and whether those effects vary under different weather conditions. In this paper we examine how message practices used on Twitter by the NWS are related to message engagement under routine and nonroutine weather conditions. Our analysis employs a census of tweets sent by 12 NWS Weather Forecast Offices in spring 2016 and uses a combination of manual and automated coding to identify engagement content and microstructure features present in each message. We identify factors that increase and decrease message retransmission (retweets) within this corpus under varying threat conditions, using a mixed-effects negative binomial regression model. We find that inclusion of actionable message content, information about historical weather facts, attached visual imagery (such as a map or infograph), and named event hashtags increases message passing during both threat and nonthreat periods. In contrast, messages that include forecast and nowcast content and messages that are sent in reply to other users have a lower passing rate. Findings suggest that common message features do alter message passing, potentially informing message design practices aimed at increasing the reach of messages sent under threat conditions.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7tm7ftk

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2019-10-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact