When the death of Steve Jobs broke, Twitter lit up across the globe spreading messages like wildfire. While I would like to come back to the Apple guru, but for now let’s look at Twitter as a public relations vehicle.
No more is Twitter a playground for kids; it has become a workplace for many of us, and an opportunity for all of us. The site’s original purpose was to serve as an internal communications tool. Now, journalists use it to talk and listen to their readers and brands use it to reach consumers.
From a public relations point of view, Twitter should be taken very seriously because of its ability to alter reputations; it is regularly misused to distribute false and misleading information. I remembered that a false report on CNN’s new social news site, iReport in 2008, caused Apple stock to plummet.
So, when I heard the news of Steve Jobs death, I had to double check for accuracy. Unfortunately, this time it was real.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Twitter would at times record 10,000 posts per second mentioning the iconic entrepreneur, with 1.5 million hits on related stories across Fairfax Media’s news websites within six hours and 10,000 people reading the main story simultaneously on their websites.
My lasting memory of Steve will be the speech he gave to the graduating students at Stanford University in 2005 – ‘How to Live Before you Die’.
Some people might say that it’s a pity Steve Jobs never got to enjoy retirement; I like to think he never ‘worked’ a day in his life, because he loved what he did.
