Twittering for Earth: A Study on the Impact of Microblogging Activism on Earth Hour 2009 in Australia

The role of Twitter - a form of microblogging - as both influencer and reflector of real-world events is fast emerging in today's world of Web 2.0 and social media. In this investigation, we survey how the use of Twitter in Australia is linked to the real-world success of the Earth Hour 2009 campaign. The results of this research will give us an idea of the emergence of microblogging as a new medium of influencing human behavior and providing a source of collective intelligence in planning and decision making, specifically in the Australian context. We found that, from our observations, there is a correlation between the inter-state total energy reduction during this campaign with the amount of interstate online Twitter discussion. We also identified a link between the Twitter discussion frequency and the total real-life population of the locale in which the chatter takes place, which could be used as a yardstick to analyze the reach of online technologies in the real world.