React: How Londoners Reacted to the nice Fog of November 1st

November 5, 2015

On the morning of the primary of November, there’s all the time a atypical feeling coating metropolis streets.

the general public have been partying all evening, celebrating the spookiest day of the yr. but when November strikes, that spookiness is over. Our lives have much less skeletons and ghosts in than they ever did earlier than.

As many walk again through the streets in early hours, they’re hungover and tired.

Now, they’re frightfully aware that ‘Christmas creep’ implies that the purple cups are already out and adverts will probably be pestering them to purchase a turkey.

This year, something particularly spooky took place on the first day of November for Londoners. just because the calendar ticked over, a dense fog descended on the city.

It stayed for the morning, then lifted. Then it came again, with a-vengeance.

at the worst of the fog, visibility was once reduced to 50 meters (or, about 160 ft). You couldn’t even see to the end of your street.

of course, this meant hell for London’s air transport.

every time there’s moderately-worse-than-normal weather stipulations, Britain’s infrastructure appears to grind to a halt.

Flight after flight was canceled out of Heathrow and other London airports – which supposed that many in our trade weren’t in a position to make the net Summit in Dublin.

It used to be a living nightmare. precious Londoners are simplest simply recuperating. There’s all the time one silver lining to come back to when mild inconvenience is felt in unison across a nation: Twitter.

Let’s talk about fog

the use of the Brandwatch Analytics platform, we’ve captured every mention of the good Fog of November 1st coming from London.

We discovered 4,000 particular person tweeters from London who were talking in regards to the fog.

They have been 59% male, forty one% female, for those who were wondering – British males have a propensity to speak concerning the weather.

If we represent each mention (with region data) as a little blue dot, it seems to be something like this:

conversation in regards to the fog didn’t peak on the first day, however the 2d. It was simply as news broke that lots of commuters would have their flights canceled.

apparently, this London-angst didn’t lead to its own hashtag.

on a regular basis city dwellers will latch on to hashtag reminiscent of #tubestrike to keep abreast of the panic across the capital. This time, the topic ‘fog’ trended all on its own.

We’ve been talking a lot about going ‘past keywords‘ at Brandwatch.

an incredible part of that is mixing social data with other information sources. Some people are blending the data with industry metrics from Salesforce, or actual-time inventory price charts.

The weekend introduced a possibility to mix hour-through-hour Twitter information with correct weather data.

Plotting the 2 aspect by way of side, you will find how diminishing visibility (or, a rise in fog) sparked Twitter conversations.

The descending mist started consuming away at visibility from around 7pm on Halloween.

Twitter as a complete used to be a ways too busy bobbing for apples to care, even though a few eagle-eyed weathermen called the fog before someone else.

inspecting the chart, it’s good to know that Londoners weren’t simply complaining for the sake of it.

When visibility used to be good, tweets dropped off. When visibility used to be bad – so bad it is advisable to infrequently see your hand in entrance of your face – tweets soared.