Andrew Douglas B2B journalist, turned PR man, specializing in new media.

I lived through a social media car crash

I lived through a social media car crash yesterday... and it has me jazzed.

My wife Anne (twitter.com/AnneDouglasComm) and I were presenting about social media at a conference for lawncare professionals and golf course superintendents yesterday afternoon. There were a lot of questions about Twitter so I fired up Tweetdeck on my Mac, which was projected on to a huge screen behind us. I wanted to show how you can see the most-discussed topics on Twitter in real-time.

At around 2:30 p.m., Gordon Lightfoot's name was huge on the cloud. He's a Canadian icon in the folk/rock world. I clicked on his name and saw a tweet that he'd died. With the whole audience watching, I clicked the URL that someone had posted and was directed to the National Post, a national newspaper in Canada, which was reporting that he died.

I turned to the audience and said something like, "you can't always trust what you read on Twitter but if the mainstream media confirms something, you know it's true."

HA!

Minutes later, a seminar attendee with a laptop piped up, "he's not dead!" People madly clicked around on their laptops and BlackBerry's. It turns out he can still wiggle his toes. The National Post bit on a wild rumour, possibly started after a media interview with old-time rocker Ronnie Hawkins.

A few things:

1. What a blow to the National Post brand. Twitter is buzzing and won't let the newspaper forget that it contributed to the story, even though it has taken it's original piece down off the website and is pretending it wasn't leading the "Lightfoot is Dead!" charge.
2. This shows the lightning-fast ability of Twitter and social media to wrestle with rumours and news and determine fact or fiction. It's the ultimate in crowd sourcing where you can have a swarm of people attack a piece of information and rip it apart and spread the truth.
3. Some are saying the Post should have left its original story up with a big mea culpa. I'm not so sure but I think they should have kept their part of the story in subsequent posts.
4. It was old-school journalism that cracked this open -- someone picked up a phone and called Lightfoot's publicist.

I couldn't have asked for a better real-time case study in the opportunities and challenges with social media. Thank you Gordon Lightfoot!