It may be hard for Wilmington to imagine, but this past weekend, the Washington D.C. area accumulated almost three feet of snow. When the power is out and the roads are unplowed it’s hard to come up with anything exciting to do. However, a group of young professionals in DuPont Circle formulated a plan that brought people of all ages together. The secret to their success: social media.
When news of the snow was announced on Thursday, Ami Greener and her friend Michael Lipin decided to put their Twitter accounts to a new use. As friends who live on opposite sides of DuPont Circle, they figured it would be fun to arrange a massive snowball fight for the whole city to participate in.
“You keep reading in the media how companies are using Twitter,” Greener said. “I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to do that.’ ”
The tweet went out on Thursday night, along with a Facebook group advertising the snowball fight. On Thursday the group had 33 members, but by Saturday morning it had over 5,000. On Saturday afternoon over 2,000 people, including children, young professionals and lawyers had congregated in DuPont Circle to participate in a good old fashioned snowball fight.
The fight was a carefree attempt to unite a community and take advantage of the record breaking storm. However, without the help of Twitter and Facebook, it would have undoubtedly been a much smaller event.
Stephanie Saulsbury
Stephanie,
I heard about this story a little while ago, but I didn’t really know all of the details pertaining to it. This was such a great idea for someone to have taken the initiative to utilize the social networking sites, Twitter and Facebook, as a means for people to come together and share a feeling of nostalgia. The brands of Twitter and Facebook were used to create a narrative coherence with the brand of a snowball fight. That is such a classic narrative in our culture, and it was used to bring a sense of community amongst people coming from all types of different demographics and psychographics.
Deji, thank you for your commment! I agree, this is a good example of how social media has managed to unite a community in a time when it seems as though technology is taking over, and social capital is dwindling. However, this shows that networking through facebook and twitter can enhance community involvement through something as trivial as a snowball fight.