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Around the middle of the morning the words Sir, Bobby, Robson and RIP started to trend on twitter.  It seemed that once again the social web had broken the news of the sad demise of a celebrity.  There have been several instances where this happened, a phenomenon first identified by this blog in October of last year, with the most notable occurrence being with the recent departure of Michael Jackson.

An analysis seemed to confirm that twitter was first to the news if only by a few minutes. At 10.18am (BST) @RobertMNHarvey was the first to tweet ‘RIP Bobby Robson’.  The Yorkshire Evening Press website was hot on his heels with an article timed at 10.22am, the first of the so-called conventional media to publish the story.  Four minutes later the news was on Bobby Robson’s Wikipedia entry but there was still nothing on Google News.    

I contacted the author of the twitter scoop.  Was he a hospital worker, a friend of the family, a football agent with inside knowledge perhaps? No, he had seen the story on the TV, Sky Sports News to be exact.  The crowd are are on the twits and they think it’s all over.  If you think it is time to blow the whistle on conventional news media, think again.

Marshall McLuhan was the Canadian philosopher who coined the phrase ‘global village’ in the early sixties in his book ‘The Gutenburg Galaxy’.   Even with his extraordinary prescience he could not possibly have foreseen the extent to which this would come true.

A few months ago I started using Twitter, the site where users post 140 character microblogs.  Around lunchtime every day I see a flurry of tweets wishing me a good morning.  The same thing happens at around 5pm when the dudes on the US west coast are switching on their Macs and iPhones - just at the time many of us UK folk are starting to wonder what we’re going to have for dinner.   

Last week I had a slightly bizarre experience when I was interviewed for the North West media and marketing web-site How-Do .  The interview was done via MSN by a journalist based in Beijing.  The editor who posted the story to the site is based in Oslo in Norway …and this remember for a site that serves a region of the UK .

Why does this matter?  Well it doesn’t really, except that we need to remember that the rise of the social web potentially puts much of what we communicate on a global stage.   If you screw up your message or make a fool of yourself online, remember two things - your audience might come from anywhere and the old saying is still true, every village has one.  

The United States presidential election has been the first major democratic process anywhere in the world where the use of social media has played a significant part in communications.

Of the eighteen candidates running in the primaries for the two main parties, nine had blogs, including both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.   Involvement in social networks was significant from the earliest days. Republican Mitt Romney was the first prospective candidate to launch a Facebook profile,  Democrat John Edwards set up a campaign headquarters in the cyber world of Second Life.  This resulted in a bizarre web 2.0 event when it was vandalised by the avatars of his political opponents.  Clinton used her web site to launch her campaign.

It was Barack Obama though who was the prime mover from the outset.  He engaged with most of the high profile social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter.  On the day that Barack Obama announced he was forming a presidential exploratory committee in January 2007, student government co-ordinator Farouk Olu Aregbe created a group on Facebook called “One Million Strong for Barack”.  The social web was critical to the Obama campaign in another fundamental way.  It played an important part in the funding of his bid for office.  In a campaign video directed at his supporters he said “Instead of forcing us to rely on millions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs, you’ve fuelled this campaign with donations of $5, $10, $20, whatever you can afford, and because you did, we’ve built a grassroots movement of over 1.5 million Americans.”  Obama’s success raising money via these small donations was achieved in a way never before possible as part of a U.S. presidential election campaign.

The 1960 election of John F Kennedy was thought to be point at which television became central to the democratic process.  2008 may well be the year that sees the critical intervention of the social web

For me there are two fascinating questions about the Brand and Ross debacle.  Why did they put out the show with the item in when it wasn’t live and why did the furore gather so much momentum in such a short time over a week after the broadcast?

Why was it broadcast?  Any fool could have guessed there would be an issue and there were some very experienced heads in the approval chain.  I believe that the reason for broadcasting may lie in the fact that by recording the messages on an answer machine the comments were already potentially in the public domain.   With the social web anyone can publish and Ross and Brand realised that.  By not broadcasting they would have acknowledged fault and the recording could still reach the public via the web.  The evidence might be there is in their comments in the a part of the programme that was edited out of the final broadcast: 

Ross: “let’s both put on striped t-shirts and break into his house, merely to delete the answerphone message - let’s see what happens. What could go wrong?” 

Brand:  “Nothing, literally, nothing could go wrong as we smash our way into Andrew Sachs’s house”

Ross: ”break in like cat burglars tonight when he’s in bed”

Brand: “yes while he sleeps”

They must have felt that they had escaped censure when a week went by with no outcry but the press got hold of the story when Andrew Sachs complained.  It might have ended there but for the intervention of the social web once more.  The recording appeared on YouTube and there have been a million hits - somewhat more than the average listenership for Brand’s show.  As the hits on YouTube went up so did the complaints.  A week after the show went out there were just 69 complaints to the BBC at the last count there were more than 30,000.  A coincidence?  I doubt it.