Ah, the days when your public affairs or public relations department could sit back and watch the wire for potentially adverse headlines that you could formulate a response after several meetings over the next day. The world isn’t so simple or, more to the point, so slow.
Simply put, you can’t ignore new media just like you can’t ignore old media as both intermingle in each other’s world amplifying “news” (quotes intentional), creating reach as information shoots around the world through radio (even on the back of motorcycle), television, in print, SMS, let alone Twitter. That same information is persistent, hanging around and available on YouTube and through Google.
Recommended reading on this is The Domino’s Effect: crisis over, now the hard part by online analytics company linkfluence
the incident quickly spread across various communities in a matter of a couple of days, as mass media exposure turbo-charged viral propagation of the incident over and across social networks and online communities…
…as Domino’s rushed to Youtube and Twitter to respond to the groundswell of negative publicity, they will now most likely follow the example of many other brands burned by social media. They were forced to jump into the social media arena in the midst of a crisis and had to sustain their social media presence, long after the immediate ruckus had subsided.
As news isn’t news in a newspaper the next day, it will become more and more important to tell the reader what the things that happen mean for him and not just tell him what happened…
I am sorry for a the people working in “old” media, who are overstrained by integrating the new media, with its public access to their old system of “real” journalism.
The old media are still really usefull, and we use them a lot, but that’s true that new media are more and more important and we can’t live witout them.
I totally agree with Julia. We still need to use the old media. The problem is that technology develops in an unbelievable way…so something that was producted a month ago is already old!
I think that there is a high risk of cloyingness. People can’t filter the tons of information that reaches them every day, so it is hard to decide between important and less important news. I really hope that at least serious journalists will not perish in the swirl of information…