Reading before Tweeing: Thoughts on Impact of Social Media 10/17/09

So... I know I haven't written much here lately - at all, atcually. But I'm finally and unbearably driven to address the impact of Twitter and all new viral forms of social media (Facebook, MySpace, etc. combined with iPhones, etc.) on the dissemination of news and information in our world today after being thoroughly consumed by it since I joined earlier this year. I'm a relatively slow adopter of such media (and dislike Facebook as noted previously), but to my complete surprise I've taken to Twitter like a duck to water (@podchef would be proud;), and now tweet regularly as @jandroid since joining in January 2009. I am a news junky, and it feeds my voracious appetite for the latest news quite nicely, as I follow a variety of professional and amateur sources and friends. (Did you hear about Michael Jackson's death a full 30 minutes before it was broadcast on major media - including NPR who I listen to all day? I did, from 3 different sources on Twitter. I know, many of you could absoultely care less - and know Twitter and/or the news isn't for you. I never said it was. Just me). I also follow and learn from lots of great sources promoting a wide range of interests including organic farming and gardening, classical music, the plight of honeybees worldwide and the weather in Portland, to name but a few specific to me. Even better, I've met about 20 cool new people including some government officials and media types in person here in Portland I never would have otherwise. That's 20 more than I knew 1 year ago. I continue to meet more almost weekly. (Thank @whiffies for providing some great nosh for same as well;).

Regardless, in my relatively short time tweeting, I've watched the impact of Twitter on things like the Iran election and watched as Dave Chappelle told just 4 people he'd be having an unadvertised impromptu show at mindnight one day in Pioneer Courthhouse Square in Portland, OR and had over 4000 show up. (Some say as much as 10,000, but this is unconfirmed. Regardless, it was way more than expected, and clearly illustrates power of Twitter and social media today.) I've had direct interaction with my local governmental leaders (the mayor dm-ed me once to ask what he could do for cause of bees in Portland, based on all my #tweehive campaign tweets), and had my comments broadcast on air on both television and radio via Twitter. More recently, news of a boy possibly caught in a flying saucer-shaped home made helium balloon over Colorado was madly retweeted and grabbed the world's attention even as wars are being fought and the national jobless rate surges - thanks to Twitter and other social media. Needless to say all were releived when the balloon landed quite accessibly and softly in a freshly plowed field after about 3 hours and it was found the boy was not inside, but had been hiding in the attic at home. But not before millions of people sat raptly watching their TV screens believing him to be stuck dipping and swirling over the Colorado countryside. Even planes were delayed for it.

This is powerful stuff folks, and hard to understand if you're not part of it. Do a search on #balloonboy or #iranelection at http://search.twitter.com and see for yourself. (No need to sign up with Twitter to do this). I would not have known about this story at the time myself if it weren't for twitter - I don't normally watch the noon news. But @TheSquare had tipped me off, and the rest is history - I became one of the enrapt millions watching their TV and speculating on the fate of Balloon Boy as he came to be known. Yet, we were all mislead to thinking he was in the balloon by the family themselves, whether mistakenly or not is yet to be determined. (And may never be). I'm positive they had no idea how far and wide their story would go, intentionally or not. We've never had the power of social media at our fingertips like this before to help spread the word so quickly/easily.

Then this morning (Saturday October 17th) I woke up to the last throes of an online campaign to raise money for cancer research via a campaign on Twitter using the tag #beatcancer. As stated on the www.beatcancereverywhere.com website (and retweeted widely):

"In a 24-hour period of time starting Friday, October 16th at 9 am (PDT) and lasting until Saturday, October 17th at 9am (PDT) people all over the internet stratosphere will be asked to send tweets and Facebook status updates and to blog using #BeatCancer in their posts. Ebay/Paypal and MillerCoors Brewing Company will donate a penny ($0.01)* for every Twitter message, Facebook update or blog post that includes the phrase #BeatCancer. All money will be donated to non-profit cancer organizations including SU2C (Stand Up to Cancer), Alex's Lemonade, Bright Pink, and Spirit Jump. All of the non-profits are 501 (c)(3) organizations and accredited by The American Cancer Society. A listing of all organizations and a live stream of postings can be found at www.beatcancereverywhere.com. "

That's pretty cool, and indeed it caught on like wildfire. I gladly joined in but noticed that the clock was winding down at 8:30 a.m. PDT on that same website. Thing was, there were 2 campaigns going on - one to raise money (at .01/"mention"), and the other to see if we could break the Guiness World Record for number of times a message was repeated via all social media sources including Facebook, blogs and Twitter. (Twitter being one of the fastest). But I was curious as the clock wound down to know if both the fundraising and the world record efforts were ending at 9 a.m. - or just the world record efforts? This confusion was increased by the label "World Record" over the countdown widget on the #beatcancer website, with no mention of fund raising ending specifically on that main page, where the countere was still running after the deadline.

So I tweeted about the countdown (time) and final numbers shown as counted (approx 208,000) by the deadline, and noted folks could also give directly so as to stop feeling need to tweet #beatcancer all day, and wondered same aloud. Sure enough I kept seeing additional tweets and retweets mentioning #beatcaner well after 9:00 a.m. and from what I considered some pretty intelligent and social media savvy sources as late as 9:30 a.m. PDT. So I dipped back into the www.beatcancereverywhere.com website and came up with the above quote buried on their "about" page via an unobvious link on lower right, which confirms that both a) the world record campaign was over, and b) no more money was being raised by continuing to tweet #beatcancer after 9:00 a.m. PDT. Interestingly this barely slowed down the stream of #beatcancer tweets. (Twitter campaigns often have a life of their own once unleashed). So I was grateful and relived to see another (to me) trusted source tweet that the campaign was over (true), but also that it had raised over $200,000. Wow. Well, at least they got the first part right, which made me feel better as I was hoping to get folks to "return to (more) normal programming" so to speak in their tweet streams since the campaign was done. But I wasnt' so sure about that $ figure, and suggested it might be mistakenly based on number of mentions x $1 mention, vs number of mentions x .01, which is what they said they were paying which is a little over $2000 instead. (It was also never clear if they counted multiple mentions within one tweet, or just each tweet). I sent them a link to the above which also has an * that leads to an additional note below reading "up to a specified amount". So clearly it couldn't be as much as $200,000 based on the math alone, and that still secret specified amount.

Impessively, this source tweeted a full "mea culpa" (they have over 100,000 followers) in response (good on them, and why I'm not naming them here) and sent out a corrected tweet. But it left me realizing how all of us who tweet are all really point news sources, and just like the "professional" media and news outlets (TV, radio, papers), we need to watch what we tweet (air), and check our sources. This isn't the first time I've seen it happen - just one of the larger instances. I previously fell for a hoax that Oregonian movie critic and columnist Shawn Levy had fallen for and retweeted about Gus Van Sant "tweeting his next movie idea" here in Portland. Turns out, the account he was following was a fake, and he'd fallen for it. But because I trusted Shawn Levy as a professional journalist who's actually paid for his words, I assumed he must surely be correct. It just goes to show - no one is exempt, and we're all vulnerable to attractive and shiny bits of apparent news and gossip in this age of viral information dissemination, especially from what we consider trusted sources. And I'm now one of those sources on Twitter, along with every other person/entity that tweets.

So as such, I'm starting a "Reading b4 Tweeting" campaign of my own in hopes of trying to disseminate only the most accurate and correct information on Twitter. This means I promise to take the extra 30 seconds to a minute or more needed to actually follow a link and read what the source is saying before retweeting something. If I don't have time to do this, then I shouldn't be retweeting at that moment. I hope this will help keep not only myself from mistweeting incorrect leads and info, but others as well. It's bound to still happen on occasion, but hopefully we can keep it to a minimum. Thanks to the very viral nature of Twitter, it's hard to "unring" any bell (tweet) once it's out. Join me in tweeting - with care:).