KOKI-TV, the Newport Television-owned FOX affiliate in Tulsa, OK, added viewer-contributed content on the fly to reports on severe storms and flooding last month with the a new tool from Weather Services International that taps the potential of social media and viewer submissions to bring greater depth to reports.
That tool, WSI Max Social, allows meteorologists to incorporate up-to-the-moment, interactive content from viewers during weather emergencies. According to station meteorologist Andrew Kozak, Max Social required just a few clicks to add user-generated pictures and multimedia into a report. "During the recent severe weather, we were able to use Max Social to develop graphic-map-display-info on-the-fly in a matter of minutes," he said.
WSI and SocialNewsDesk jointly developed Max Social, which not only puts meteorologists in touch with viewers who generate content and post it on their Facebook and Twitter accounts, but also lets the meteorologists send forecasts to the social media accounts of viewers.
Essentially, Max Social opens a back channel of communication via social media and the Internet between a station meteorologist and viewers to exchange information, pictures and videos through social networking. Max Social is a new addition to TruVu Max, WSI's weather presentation platform for broadcasters.
SocialNewsDesk's newsroom system gives all members of a station's news team the ability to participate in a social media strategy by quickly posting breaking news to social channels. Journalists can collaborate to publish content on multiple social accounts, respond to comments and monitor which posts are most popular.