It’s remarkable that there are still some people who believe that a damaging mention of their brand on Twitter will eventually evaporate into the ether. After all, social media sites and their users have the attention span of a gnat, right?
Wrong. The BBC is only one of many outlets telling its journalists to monitor the social media for news stories.
Those who have fallen foul of the mainstream media’s new interest in what’s being said online include the England cricketer Kevin Pietersen, who was forced to apologise after a tirade on Twitter about being dropped from the squad was picked up by the newspapers. Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant 
whose temper tantrum has spawned a cottage industry on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, caused all sorts of problems for the airline in more traditional outlets. Even Sky Sports has fallen foul of the trend, after the papers discovered that one of its presenters was posting suggestive tweets on Twitter. The television channel was forced to take action over what it believed was damage to its reputation. The most recent example is the controversy surrounding the Foreign Secretary, William Hague.
The lesson from all of this? The social media sites no longer exist in isolation from the mainstream media, and old methods of crisis management are dead in the water. You need to stop the problem as soon as it starts, and that’s where gem can help.