Save your reputation in 48 hours? You might not even have four

This piece in yesterday’s Financial Times on how crisis management has changed thanks to the ‘online onslaught’ is worth a read. It goes over various factors, such as how having a few key journalist mates won’t work anymore when things spread on Twitter and YouTube.

The article makes the point that you have 48 hours to restore your credibility as after that people generally won’t visit your website to get your point of view. Actually you’ll be lucky to have that long and three examples here in the UK this week shows how Twitter and online media can set the news agenda and force some major corporate players to change tack within hours.

1 - Blogger Jonathan MacDonald filmed a London Underground staff member abusing an elderly passenger on Thursday. It went viral on Twitter on Friday and by the afternoon was on the front page of the (London) Evening Standard.

Result - the staff member has been suspended.

2 - Yesterday Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir ran a piece on the death of Stephen Gately (of Boyzone), using it to make a comment on gay marriage, saying that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after-myth of civil partnerships’ (despite the fact that the coroner ruled he died of natural causes rather than for any “lifestyle” reasons).

Journalism blogger Malcolm Coles among others started asking UK tweeple to tweet to BT, M&S and Visit England asking them to pull their ads from the article…and they did.

3 - Finally, earlier in the week, Twitter played a key part in The Guardian getting around the UK’s tough libel laws. The Guardian was prevented from reporting on an environmental scandal involving energy concern Trafigura, despite the fact that it featured in a Parliamentary question.

By the end of the day, after the issue being one of the top trending topics on Twitter, the gagging order was lifted. As the Guardian says, ‘A few tweets and freedom of speech is restored.’

All this yet again answers the question of what Twitter is good for. Yes Twitter’s ‘active’ user base is fairly small, with 5% of users accounting for most tweets, which would put the core (as opposed to casual) worldwide audience at around 2.5 million (with around 1.5 million in the States and perhaps 250k in the UK).

But the numbers using it are less important than who is using it. As David Bowen says in the FT, Twitter is a ‘connector’ that has a short lifespan but high viral power. Your mum or the bloke in the pub probably won’t care about it. But journalists and bloggers do - they are on there and listening in.

Video - The London Underground incident as captured by blogger Jonathan MacDonald.