Asiana Air 214 Crash and Twitter: More Haste; Less Noise

Like many others I spent a portion of Sunday afternoon following the Twitter stream related to the airline accident in San Francisco. It was instructive. The coverage started with the shock of an air crash on American soil. That was rapidly followed by the good news story of David Eun’s tweet about his own escape from the aircraft and the apparently miraculous survival of the passengers and crew. Mr Eun’s story was widely picked up by the established news media. The next phase was the report of the death of one passenger and the hospitalization of ten more in critical condition. Not much changed for an hour or so despite the thousands of tweets saying the same thing and odd diversions such as assorted ‘hopes and prayers’ and random attacks on Sheryl Sandberg for publicly issuing a status update saying she was nearly on the plane.

The next wave of updates reported the second death, and turned more sinister as reports emerged from the San Francisco FD that 60 passengers were unaccounted for, thereby shifting perception from miraculous escape to full blown tragedy. Happily this information, despite the thousands of re-tweets, proved inaccurate within another hour, and after around six hours the scale of the incident was back to its original level.

Inevitably the volume of posts multiplied in synch with the apparent gravity of the news, and one almost got the sense of a feeding frenzy around becoming a commentator on a major event. This rather begs the question, “Should there be any etiquette in tweeting information you do not have first-hand, or re-tweeting information that has already passed through every established news organization?” The question one might ask is, “Am I adding value or perspective to the story?” Reading through the thousands of tweets the only conclusion one could reach is that few contributors could answer yes to that question; many more simply confused the signal with more noise and in turn made the underlying narrative harder to follow for the people who wanted information but had no intention of commenting on it.

Inherent in this is a flaw we see increasingly with ‘generation blurt’: the desire to speak and comment in public just because you can, not because you have anything interesting or useful to say.

Rob Norman is Chief Digital Officer Global of GroupM. Rob’s principle tasks are developing theinteraction organization within GroupM, developing positioning and thought leadership and leading the interaction contribution to business development. You can reach Rob at @robnorman or rob.norman@groupm.com.

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