You’re stuck in sudden unexpected traffic and you’ve got somewhere to be.  The navigation app. that guided you here is acting like it didn’t do this to you and now tells you that you’re in heavy traffic.  Thanks captain obvious!

You decide to be resourceful and pull up a news app to look for local updates, only to see this horrible deadlock is NOT being covered.  As a last resort, you decide to go old school and skim through the radio for local traffic news.   Five minutes later you’ve simply wasted your time listening to other accidents and commercials while you sit aggravatingly still.

What’s going on around you causing you to be late!?  No one likes having an excuse of, “sorry I hit traffic”.  It makes you seem unprepared and lacking forethought.

This happened to me while in New York en route to a million dollar RFP for our ad agency.  Only I made it out of the jam and arrived early to the pitch because I used an unexpected tool that most professionals turn their noses up toward and think it beneath their maturity level.

Nothing speaks louder than a personal video of what’s happening in real time.  You aren’t being manipulated by left or right winged half-truths because you see the full story from impartial witnesses that are simply sharing their reality: not filtered truths (well minus the actual puppy dog filters).  The tool I used was Snapchat.

REAL LIFE STORIES, IN REAL-TIME

This same situation applies to many areas of our life.  Take the storm that hit Houston.  I could see where my friends were located in relation to the flooded streets.  Live Snapchat streams of people living in Florida showed me when Hurricane Irma had touched down and if it was near my family.  My heart broke as stories flooded in with the destruction of Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria, seeing the damage before the news could report on it.  I saw the streets shake as Mexico was hit with an earthquake minutes after it happened.  I saw unexpected protests in New York thanks to the heat map.  You can even see how many other Wonder Women are already at the Halloween party by looking at the snap stories before you leave.  No one likes ending up on who wore it best.

NEW GENERATION OF JOURNALISM

We are a generation that no longer waits for institutions to tell us what's happening around us from their partial views.  We report it ourselves and we share our truths as we experience them.  We don’t tell you how to feel, that’s your own interpretation.

Snapchat is organically evolving into a platform that allows people to become quasi-journalists in reporting what they see the moment they see it.  Fake news has become such a common term we use it as a joke.  Is it any surprise that we would find a new way to reinvent the industry through other tools?  Granted, some of the stories will simply be a dancing hot dog or mini-me emojis, but it's a start in the right direction.

WHERE TO FIND THE FEATURE

The hidden feature that is making Snapchat more reliable than CNN and Waze is the Snapchat heat map.  It’s nothing you’ll find easily within the app unless someone shows you.  Below you'll find an easy gif. video demonstration that shows you how to access the hidden feature.