Hillside Media Training

It starts with a low fever but over the next months will become rampant and out of control – general election campaigning is contagious and upon both us & Downing Street like a dose of political swine flu.

Soon we will all be begging for a vaccination as kills are notched up on political belts. Ex head of News of the World and Tory head of comms, Andy Coulson, is the current victim of this soon to spread viral campaign. As momentum grows and the police start fully investigating the bugging claims one wonders where this will end.

If the superstars decide that the spying on them was an obvious breach of human rights and start a class action Murdoch could rue the day he got involved with British media. Celebrities, politicians and chiefs like Elle Macpherson, John Prescott and Max Clifford have enough financial clout to ensure that the next scalp could even be the News of the World itself.

And all this comes as a possible revenge attack from Labour for the recent head of Labour’s Damian McBride demise over email slurs against senior Tories.

From now until May next year, if Gordon Brown waits to the bitter end to go to the country, this clash will become even fiercer. Ten months away and the fever is only just hotting up…

Last election there was no Twitter, no Facebook and no real internet viral campaigning – this time they will mean that election fever will be so in our face we will be begging for mercy.

Casualties?  Well, McBride and possibly Coulson might be wondering what has hit them. News of the World  is probably hoping this is a simple sore throat. The next few weeks will see if they’ve just caught a political cold or are suffering the potential fatal effects of full blown election campaigning.

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.