I knew Michael Jackson had died within an hour of the ambulance being called to his LA Home, even though I lived thousands of miles away in the Southern English countryside. I probably knew the tragic news before his family.
Such is the bizarre immediacy that is called social networking.
My daughter called me to say she’d read it on Facebook and her friend had read it on Twitter. We all scrambled for real confirmation, cruising news websites and posting running commentaries on what we had found and how we felt. I’d started up a chat with a close friend in Vegas who had also heard. Someone from Thailand, Australia and Dubai all chipped in their emotions, news and suddenly favourite songs and moments were being shared.
We all plundered YouTube for clicks to send each other. It was amazing both YouTube and Facebook didn’t implode with the global frenetic activity that had sprung to life.
As in life in death Michael Jackson had claimed another first: the quickest news story to break round the world. And all care of social networking, leaving the traditional news ‘leaders’, CNN, BBC and even news webpages of internet giants like AOL to play catch up. Interesting that Time Warner, parent of AOL, own TMZ, the showbiz site that broke the story first.
In all my years of journalism I have never seen anything like it. It gave me goosebumps, to be honest. This was phenomenal. I knew I was witnessing a whole new era of news.
And so PR and comms team must take note. Traditional media campaigns are, for all intent and purposes, dead. Everyone has been banging on for years about the global reach of social networking but it has been like a gentle paternal pat on the head by the big guys. It was patronisingly known as ‘how to reach the youff audience’.
Today they must sit up. It is time to take account of this seismic shift in media power. This is nothing about youth any more – this is about how we are all talking, chatting, taking control of the information and news that we want in our lives and how we can influence and drive that content on to another plane of our choosing by adding our own touches of creativity, such as sharing music, film or memories.
Many commentators feel that Michael Jackson never grew up. He was a boy-man star locked in a fantasy childhood dream. Well, sadly care of his early death, he has forced the world to recognise that the so-called new media is now all grown up and truly come of age.
