The Creative Alliance, Strategic Marketing, Interactive, Public Relations

Credibility and Brands in the Age of Twitter

“Never before has a crisis unleashed so much raw data—and so little interpretation…”

Thus begins Alexander Wolfe’s insightful InformationWeek.com article about Twitter and the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai. The deluge of postings, images, tweets and phone calls live from the scene made this a watershed event in news dissemination.

Unsurprisingly, the user-generated coverage created a scenario in which at least one Twitter host was aggregating information in what seemed like an authoritative resource, but may have contained many inaccuracies.

(We’ll put aside for now the question of how extensive a security issue is at stake when terrorists can potentially access social media users’ real-time updates on the condition and whereabouts of hostages or the movements of police.)

The situation in Mumbai suggests that the much-feared Big Brother impact of Google and other info-behemoths has perhaps given way to the equally dangerous mass creation and distribution of unvetted data from unverifiable sources. Some major news media outlets played into the trap, relying on these questionable sources as part of their information gathering efforts.

The concern for marketers is that this empowerment of the masses via social media—and the speed at which postings can spread—can undermine the credibility of a brand. Any opinion, rumor or truth about a brand can rapidly gain prominence in the world of user-generated content. A brand’s response via social media must feel authentic and be carefully calibrated for the intended audience.

Social media credibility will need to be bolstered by other forms of brand-building, PR and information distribution, because one thing that has not changed in the age of Twitter is this: Brands are belief systems, and that makes maintaining credibility more important than ever before.