‘Public Relations and the Social Web’ (the book to which this blog is a companion) is now published in the United States. It is available for immediate delivery from Amazon.com or directly from the publishers KoganPageUSA. In the UK it can be ordered from Amazon.co.uk or from Kogan Page (and a range of other booksellers).
Fact and Fiction on the Web
13 05 2009
We tend to believe that we have a natural instinct for the truth but the web has many inaccuracies that are commonly held to be factual. We can follow the old journalistic principle of getting at least two reliable sources for important pieces of information, but much of the internet is a mash up of other bits of the internet. The resulting multiplicity of sources might suggest a breadth of knowledge but in reality if a factoid is convincing enough it can spread.
Wikipedia is amongst the most reliable of sources because the content is genuinely the result of multiple entries, sometimes hundreds of them. Even Wikipedia has been guilty of significant errors – often the result of malicious editing. Prominent US journalist John Seigenthaler was incorrectly named as a suspect in the assassinations of both President John F Kennedy and his brother, Robert for example. The false information was the work of a man called Brian Chase, who said he was trying to trick a colleague at work.
A common error is that of the false obituary. It has even been know for false obituaries to be published on on separate occasions. Pre-written obituaries of entertainer Bob Hope were accidentally released on news web sites on two occasions and Pope John Paul II was the recipient of three separate reports of his demise. Other widely duplicated falsehoods on the internet include a report that Barack Obama is a muslim and that Bill Gates is giving away his fortune. This sort of widely distributed misconception is not the preserve of the Internet, for example the Great Wall of China Is not in fact nor ever has been, visible from the Moon, but the internet provides a distribution network that spreads these inaccuracies more widely and more quickly.
It is not just facts that are manipulated and distorted, the prevalence of powerful image manipulation tools means that photographs can not necessarily be trusted either. Even the celebrated news agency Reuters came under fire for this when in 2006 it published doctored images of an Israeli air strike in Beirut.
This entry is adapted from ‘Public Relations and the Social Web’ available from Amazon.
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Tags: 'PR and the Social Web', Barack Obama, Beirut, Bill Gates, Bop Hope, Brian Chase, factoid, Great Wall of China, John F Kennedy, John Siegenthaler, Moon, obituary, Public Relations and the Social Web, Reuters, Robert Kennedy, Wikipedia
Categories : Social Web, User Generated Content
Social Search
19 03 2009
An article appeared in Popular Mechanics in April last year that began with the words “Search is dead”. The argument was that the huge escalation in social networks would eventually make algorithm based search engines redundant. This is a pretty bold claim when Google has become arguably the world’s most powerful brand. The core of the argument is that as social networking grows web users will find what they want by using their social network rather than search because of trust. Indeed people in general will know the answer that you want better than a mathematical equation. This has begun to happen with Twitter. Within days of starting to use the service I saw a request from Jemima Kiss, technology writer for The Guardian for information about about iTunes and a request from social media guru Shel Israel for information on business applications on Twitter. Shel got what he wanted in just 10 minutes, admittedly quite a bit slower than Google but qualified by trusted human intelligence:
“shelisrael: Thanks everyone. I just got 10 good Twitter biz apps in 10 minutes. Keep them coming when you find them, please.”
Online communities are often built or reinforced around the notion of shared interests. We create an enormous amount of data when we participate in social networks and this information finds people through the various filters people set up within their social networks. Twitter is instant, Google has to index a page before it can search for it. We may be witnessing the beginning of the erosion of Google’s dominance in search.
This article is adapted from a more in depth piece in the book ‘Public Relations and the Social Web’ available now from Amazon.
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Tags: Google, Jemima Kiss, Public Relations and the Social Web, Search is Dead, Shel Israel, Social Search, Twitter
Categories : Social Web, Twitter
PR and the Social Web 