Piaras Kelly PR – Public Relations in Ireland

I was reading an interview with Max Clifford in Hot Press recently and his comments about Twitter caught my attention. Speaking in the context of the Ryan Giggs/Imogen Thomas scandal, Clifford said, “There are so many things written on Twitter which are total nonsense, it doesn’t have anything like the same impact [as the front page of a national newspaper].“

With approximately 140 million tweets posted per day, how does one tell what’s garbage and what’s not? For every superinjunction that is revealed, a hoax spreads like wildfire.

One interesting aspect of this is that media have reported incorrectly on a number of stories that originated online as they were not verified. For example in the last two weeks alone, Amina Araff, the blogger who presented herself online as “A Gay Girl in Damascus”, was revealed to be a man; a number of outlets reported on a mass grave which turned out to be nothing more than a hoax call; and the story of a girl who got her 152 Facebook friends tattooed onto her arm was incorrect also as it was just a temporary transfer.

There has been a lot of commentary recently about how people are increasingly turning to Twitter for breaking news ahead of mainstream media websites. While journalists may be under some pressure to break stories, I think it is increasingly more important that their role is to guide how news emerges by verifying whether the information is accurate. It is obvious something which is being addressed as the process the BBC uses to verify user generated content illustrates.

Steve Rubel has done some really interesting research in this space and I’d recommend reading his presentation ‘Authority in the Age of Overload’, which I’ve included below. Rubel correctly concludes that people will increasingly turn to a trusted group of sources before a message resonates with them.

In my opinion, it is more important that journalists reinforce their position in this authoritative role as a trusted source of information, rather than rushing to break news.