Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
The hashtag #Sandy on Instagram has more than 315,000 photos, most of them uploaded during the last 24 hours during the hurricane Sandy in New York and the east coast in the USA. The vast number of images uploaded by ordinary citizens is a gold mine for news media. We have seen it before and this time it is happening again, journalists asking for permission to use photos on Instagram in their reporting.
Here are a few examples of comments on one single photo:
During breaking news stories like natural disasters, social media can be an invaluable news source. The problem is that with increasing attention the likeliness that someone will take advantage of the situation also increases. Yesterday, it didn’t take long for spam links to appear on Twitter under the hashtag #hitsunami which was used to report about events during the supposed tsunami that would hit Hawaii.
Also, pranksters and people who are just misinformed tend to spread false rumours and fake photos and videos because social media is so fast and few of us actually stop for a moment to check the source of the information. A photo from the hurricane Sandy, aka Frankenstorm, has just gone viral on Facebook with currently more than 177,000 shares. The problem is that it is fake, and definitely not taken today. A quick picture search on Google reveals that the image appeared already two years ago.
A two year old version of the image from Sept 16, 2010 was posted on Urban Legends (link now taken down).
The person who posted the image on Facebook also did some research and concluded that it was fake:
Here is the original photo of the thunderstorm that was used to create the fake image:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/n_supercell_thunderstorm.htm
As always, it if looks to good to be true, it probably isn’t true. Stop for a moment and check before you share.
Hat tip: I found this via Andreas, @Iam_Curtis on Twitter.
In a recent campaign, Bob Dylan invited fans in Canada to create a video for his song “Duquesne Whistle” in the same style as his classic video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Fans could participate in a contest by choosing words or phrases of the lyrics, write them on a sign, take a photo and then tag photos on Instagram with the hashtag #dylanlyricphotos.
About 130 images were uploaded using that hashtag and some of them ended up in the final version of the video:
A similar idea was launched by the Swedish winner of the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 – Loreen. Fans were invited to post photos on Instagram and a video for “Euphoria” was to be produced. However, I have never seen if that idea ever materialized. More information about the Dylan video here and here.
And here is the original video for “Duquesne Whistle”.
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Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo has quite a fan base. On Twitter, he has close to 14 million followers and on the Chinese equivalent Sina Weibo, he has 9 million followers. But it is on Facebook that the largest number of fans are connected to Real Madrid’s forward. He has now reached 50 million fans on Facebook, beating rival Leo Messi of FC Barcelona with more than 11 million.
Impressive as that is, it still doesn’t put Ronaldo in the top ten of most liked Facebook pages. The top ten according to Fanpagelist.com are:
Pinterest is popular for sharing images on topics such as crafts, gifts, hobbies/leisure, interior design, and fashion designers/collections. But here’s a way to use Pinterest that I bet you didn’t think was possible. A local newspaper in Pennsylvania uses the site to find people who are wanted by the local police. The Pottstown Mercury has created a board called Wanted by Police with mug shots of suspects. It also has descriptions of the suspected crime. Apparently local police say there has been a 58 percent increase in the number of arrests since the Pinterest site went live.
While that all sounds nice, the paper (and in other instances, the police), must strike a balance between assisting the law enforcement and protecting the integrity of people who are not yet convicted of a crime. You might remember how the Manchester police in the UK outed convicted criminals on Flickr after the riots last year? There’s always a risk when individuals are publicly outed as criminals, or suspects, that things get out of hand. What responsibility does that paper have if one of these individuals are later acquitted in the court, but in the eyes of the public still seemed as guilty? I’m not saying that this is entirely a bad thing, but acts like these have to be thought through, carefully, or they might cause more harm than good.