“Believe none of what you hear and half of what they Twitter”

With all of the positives that we get from the Internet, it is of course logical that there must be just as many negatives.  You must take the good with caution, making sure that you are careful about what you post—more importantly about what you believe.

As human beings, we are creatures of community and we constantly build and thrive off of each other.  Unfortunately, this means that we are sometimes easily influenced by those around us, especially if we are the odd one out.  What is popular is often easier to follow; who would believe that crazy person who said the Earth revolves around the Sun?

We experience this all the time.  From the time you were in grade school and picked on someone because everyone else was doing it to now when you decide to try that restaurant everyone loves just one more time, even though you’ve hated it the first 3. The Internet is very similar.  Twitter and other social media gives people a perfect setting to share important stories and vital information within seconds, but can also spread false information like a plague.

A hoax video of Michael Jackson coming out of a coroner’s van was released on YouTube in Berlin, Germany as an experiment to show how quickly misinformation and conspiracy theories can spread on the Internet. The video received over 800,000 hits, and yes, there were people who believed he is alive even after the 2-month long E!, Extra, VH1, CNN, NBC, etc.  mourning that we all could not escape.  Thanks to the television frenzy about MJ, I can now officially say that I am able to retell Jackson’s life story from his troubled childhood to life at Neverland.

An article about the hoax was posted on Yahoo Entertainment News.

I know you’re thinking that you are not that ridiculously gullible and could tell the difference between truth and fiction.  But, social media is so widespread that for every one million people online that would instantly identify a hoax, there are an equal amount of people who would believe it.

If you look deeper, this could be interpreted into exactly how and why social media works for advertising and marketing. There will always be someone that would buy Britney Spears’ hair ball on eBay or that would look for a company to help them decorate their house entirely in popcorn.  Bottom line, there is an online audience for just about everything, hence why digital marketing is simply golden.

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Tagged as: Berlin, Britney Spears, cnn, Conspiracy theory, germany, Michael Jackson, nbc, YouTube