Last Friday, thanks to Twitter, it came to my attention that a particularly nasty article had been written in the Daily Mail by Jan Moir about the death of singer Stephen Gately. I avoid reading newspapers for this very reason – slanted, biased and (as in the case of the Daily Mail which was our family’s newspaper during my formative years) often bigoted writing.

I won’t go into great detail about the article originally entitled (and then changed after the complaints started to reach the Daily Mail) “Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death” (you can read about it and the backlash yourself by doing a search for Jan Moir online) but essentially it was a piece of homophobic drivel.

This blog isn’t the place for me to share my indepth views on everything she said (or implied). What interested me was the quote she gave to the media after the backlash started. I was on a particularly long drive to a friend’s wedding and caught the radio news discussing the number of complaints that had been made and some of the comments from celebs on Twitter.

Mischievous in the Extreme

Jan Moir’s retort was “In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.”

The phrase that made me laugh was “heavily orchestrated internet campaign.”

What Jan Moir, the Daily Mail and any other person or company that may come under public scrutiny needs to understand is that there is nothing “heavily orchestrated” about this. The beauty (and the danger) of social media is that a few disgruntled readers can quickly escalate into a baying crowd.

This isn’t the first time social media has forced a company to re-think their actions after a sudden backlash. US company Motrin had to make apologies and withdraw an advertising campaign after mothers around the world took offence over a badly targeted advert and spread the word using Twitter.

In the case of the Daily Mail, word of the article reached a few prominent people on Twitter such as Stephen Fry, who tweeted about it and then suddenly word was spreading like wildfire. I saw it and told my friends who aren’t on Twitter, they told other friends by email and Facebook. I’m sure word spread in this way throughout the country (and the world). It quickly became a trending topic on Twitter which means even more people learned about it, simply through curiosity over why it was trending.

Heavily Orchestrated

“Heavily orchestrated” suggests that someone had anticipated her vile article and had created a network to deal with it. Social networking is far more spontaneous than that. The network is in place but it’s based on relationships that are built over time. If people didn’t like what Stephen Fry or any other celebrity tweeted, they would stop following them. If they used social media just for their own divisive ends then we would soon be sick of them. But when one of them expresses anger or annoyance many of their followers will take the time to find out the facts and then respond according to their own beliefs and the level of emotion it induced.

Social media is where topical discussion is taking place. We live in an age where anyone can share their views through blogging, video, forums and microblogging, and often reach large numbers of people with similar views and interests. We may not march on the capital so much anymore or camp out with our sisters singing Kumbaya at Greenham Common for months, but we can do a hell of a lot more damage just by sharing our thoughts, cares and annoyances online.

It has its downsides too. It means that everything we do and say in public is open to  scrutiny (I have a big mouth that tends to run away with me and I am liable to share those things on Twitter before reining myself in). Have an outburst or say something controversial and you may find it coming back on you ten-fold (sometimes in the form of criticism, sometimes in support).

Why Many Businesses Fail with Social Media

Big corporations and businesses think they can control every aspect of their public persona and actually DO try to orchestrate their social media campaigns without understanding the nature of the beast. They ignore the social aspect and instead of building relationships and entering the conversation they try to start the conversation, broadcast their marketing message and control the response.

In the case of the Daily Mail, an article that may have (pre-social media) received a few complaints has seen 1000+ [update: since hearing the news bulletin on Friday that number has risen to over 21,000 complaints - the most ever received] and will probably result in some sort of further action being taken.

The downside is that their readership may have increased due to others with similar bigoted views seeing the publicity and realizing that this is the newspaper for them (they do say “there is no such thing as bad publicity”).

My only hope is that the Daily Mail will be hit where it hurts the most – their pockets – through their advertisers leaving them in droves.

The sooner businesses realize that social media is not simply the realm of children orchestrating mischief for their own fun and games the better for them and us.