As elegantly spoken about by Chris Jarvis on this site, companies are continuing to discover that the Social Network is, beyond a decent movie, an effective way to improve visibility in the crowded marketplace. Particularly in the last eighteen month blogs have been written, apps built, tweets tweeted and facebook pages “liked” at an astonishing rate. But there is a dark side. As the communication channels became further distributed so too does control of the messaging.
The inaccurately reported demise of Morgan Freeman on Twitter in December, 2010 may not have been of great concern to businesses except CNN, who was wrongly credited as the source and forced to announce his continued ‘alive-ness’. But similarly erroneous stories about a company or a product can cast a funereal gloom on hard-earned reputations and brand value.
Case in point. The website of one of the most internationally known and respected science communications companies ran an article that recommended that people not eat certain tropical fruits because of the large carbon footprint they amass during importation. The article proved influential and was linked to and quoted widely across the blogosphere accompanied by comments about how people were going to change their buying behaviours in light of these findings. The only trouble was that the article was wrong. The sources referenced in the article provided data that wasn’t transferable to all of the products in question. Compounding the use of the wrong data set, the author made a significant mathematical error that took bad numbers and made them worse.
