The Weather Channel blows social media away with Tornado Week stunt

Interns have to deal with a lot at their jobs: Menial tasks, little appreciation, not a lot of pay. However, The Weather Channel’s interns spent at least one week this spring quite literally having a blast.

Or maybe it was more like facing down a blast, specifically, of wind. For the week of April 29, the cable channel put a group of interns in a small studio and surrounded them with industrial-strength fans pumping out tornado-strength winds. It was all broadcast, live, on YouTube, as a way to promote The Weather Channel’s Tornado Week.

That wasn’t all. The social media component of the stunt was that the more tweets with the hashtag #TornadoWeek that popped up on Twitter, the stronger the wind got. By the end of the week, more than 47,000 tweets with that hashtag had been posted—about 2,000 more came after the event was over—and the winds were going at an effective speed of 140 miles per hour.

The stunt proved a huge hit for the brand, and more stunts like it are sure to come.

A whirlwind plan