–SCENE 1: “Discovery of the Manuscript”–

——(The year is 2019 and civilization on planet Earth exists no longer)

ENTER: Alien spaceship. The doors open, hissing.

——(The squad of heavily armored aliens clamber tentatively down from the smoking vessel. The leader signals to move forward and they begin to navigate the wasteland)

LEADER: (Indecipherable.) Subtitles read: “What the fuck was that?”

——(The leader follows the path of a three-headed cockroach as it scuttles clumsily over a piece of paper. They look closer, raising their protective masks to read the strange markings. Unearthing the sheet from the rubble, they raise it to the dull sun.)

LEADER: (Indecipherable.) Subtitles read: “It’s an excerpt from the Brandwatch Blog. The legend is true!”

——(The aliens hop and high-five. They have discovered what they came for. It is this blog post.)

—SCENE ENDS—

Putting together a Nuclear War Survival Guide with social data

At the beginning of each week, I sit down with our wonderful editor Natalie and we talk about what we plan to cover in the week ahead.

We’ll talk about what’s trending, what topics could resonate with our audience, what completely random thoughts have occurred to us over the weekend and, always, how we can use our data to save the world.

So, naturally, this week we decided to write a Nuclear War Survival Guide based on data generated using Brandwatch products. It’s definitely a trending topic.

How does one go about learning how to survive nuclear war using social data? We take a tongue-in-cheek look, because if you can’t laugh, what can you do?

Before we get going, we’d like to point out that the overall theme of this post is that we are all pretty under-prepared, and the tips you’ll find here if you’re genuinely reading this from a nuclear bunker will be sorely disappointing.

Step one: Looking to the influencers

The average person is not prepared for nuclear war. Who might be? Survivalists!

We used Brandwatch Audiences to find self-identified survivalists (people who have “survivalist” in their Twitter bio). The authors we found (1,700 in total) were predominantly male and seemed to be prepping for Zombie apocalypses more than nuclear wars, but we thought we’d see what they had to say anyway.

We exported a few hundred of the most influential accounts into Brandwatch Analytics to see what they might be sharing and discussing in regard to our bleak nuclear future.

To be fair, there wasn’t an enormous amount of conversation to work with here. There wasn’t so much talk of how to prepare for nuclear attack, more speculation about when one might occur.

In our first example tweet, @SurvivalPulse shares an article that uses excerpts from an interview between Alex Jones and Joel Skousen on how one might predict a nuclear war and when to evacuate large cities.

The Trigger: If This Ever Happens You Know You’re Days Away From Nuclear War https://t.co/U0CNZvGJtk | #altnews #survival #shtf — Survival Pulse (@SurvivalPulse) August 14, 2017

The second is a brief news report shared by one of our survivalist influencers, in which the inside of an old nuclear war shelter is toured by reporter Tom Miller.

People in Sacramento used to be really worried about a nuclear attack. Here's a fallout shelter that's still standing. pic.twitter.com/9numo8TOnn — Tom Miller (@TomMillerKXAN) August 12, 2017

So far, not so helpful, sadly.

Step two: The dedicated r/survival community

If you hang out on Reddit you’ll know there’s a subreddit for nearly everything, so armed with our new Reddit data powers we went straight to r/Survival to look for tips on surviving nuclear armageddon.

However, far from discussing how to outrun the blast, their conversation for the last seven days has focused more on bodily excretions.

It turns out the subreddit is more focused on short term survival in the wilderness, not a full on nuclear winter.

But we did find this survival blog posted on the subreddit with some helpful nuggets on building up the food we’ll need to survive a disaster.

Basically, if we start stocking up now we’ll avoid the massive rush to get to the supermarket when threats become more intense.

With a little time and effort you can easily put up your first 30 day food supply and then start working on your longer term storage plans. Make a plan with a budget and stick to it and you will come through most emergencies just fine.

While stocking up on food is probably a good idea, we’re getting the sense that so far our quest to build a Nuclear War Surival Guide based on what people are talking about on the internet isn’t going very well…