So, by now, we all know the name of the footballer who allegedly had an affair with a model. Right? Proof positive that injunctions are now useless, the story is now in the public domain and that Twitter rules. Hurray, it’s the dawn of a new era!
Except it’s not quite that simple. Yes, the papers now feel confident in printing that he took out an injunction against the story being published, but they still can’t print the story they want to – otherwise The Sun would have a lot more to say than “It’s Ryan Giggs” today.
Twitter is an incredibly powerful tool, and an incredibly powerful amplifier, with stories spreading across the network within minutes. But with any such spread, there needs to be a point of creation, a reference point, a link back. For most people on Twitter the Ryan Giggs story was bubbling along in the background, and there wasn’t really anything more to share, until he decided to ‘sue Twitter’. At that point people started to flood their streams with his name, change their avatars to his photo and openly mock the idea that he’d been advised to find out who had tweeted his information, and prosecute.
But this wasn’t a spontaneous outpouring of tweets, the hive mind didn’t magically sense that a lawyers letter had arrived. The tweets were a response to the reporting of the story on the BBC, or on Sky or other mainstream media outlets. The floodgates may have opened at that point, but someone had their hand on the lever. And what rushed out was largely limited to the headline information that a lot of people have known about for months.
But people don’t buy newspapers for the headlines, that’s what the papers give away for free, we buy the papers for the details, the juicy nuggets that they can’t find anywhere else. And as Justice Eady said yesterday when refusing to lift the injunction.
The truth is, that no matter how powerful Twitter is, a tweet is only as good as its link. Twitter storms tend to emerge because several people have seen the same story somewhere else, and start linking to it, and sharing it. Anyone who has ever tried to get noticed on Twitter knows how hard it can be to get anyone to actually care about your tweets. It takes the broadcast ability of the mass media to create something that appears to have a life of it’s own.
The dynamic has changed, and is still changing, but this particular story is much more about old media than new – and anyone (or any paper) that tries to convince you otherwise, it trying to distract you from that fact.
Lydia Bates is a communications junky, and the creative force behind soon-to-be-launched Copperwire Communications , you can catch up with her other musings on business communications and the media at That’s What She Said, the Copperwire blog, or follow her on twitter @lydiajo.
Nice post…and pic!