I Survivied the Great Quake of '08

If you live in the southern region of Sweden called Skåne, you got a bit of a surprise this morning. The strongest earthquake in 100 years hit us with a magnitude of 4.7 on the Richter scale. Personally, I was asleep and by the time it was over I thought it was the dog scratching himself (he’s a big dog and a vicious scratcher). 

When I got up to do my morning Twitter check, I discovered two things:

1.    My boss is up by 6:30 am.
2.    I slept through an earthquake
 
I went to work and checked my Twitter feeds again. People were talking about the earthquake and the comments ranged from shock to dismay to "huh, there was an earthquake?" 

So the reaction wasn’t overwhelming (it was a pretty small earthquake) but what's interesting is that I was able to find useful news links and discover how people reacted to the quake from all over Sweden and Denmark. Within minutes of the event, people started talking about it. I didn’t have to wait for the news to report, and when they did, someone provided a link before I even had a chance to search it out.

It's no wonder that newspapers are going bankrupt.  More and more, people are turning online to keep apace of current events.  Who wants to wait for the next edition of a newspaper when you can go online and find out instantly? 

My favorite tweet is from @choirshark, ”Huh? Earthquake in Sweden? It's like 'snowstorm in the sahara'"

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He love to talk about social media and won't shut up about Twitter.