The reach of the internet fascinates me. The speed of email, blogs, and websites is old news. Now communication tools like Twitter thrust words into light speed. A few years ago I could email everyone I know. Today I can send a Twitter update to a plethora people, some I know and most I don’t. Either way, I can influence others with very little effort. They, in turn, can influence those who follow them.
When I wake up in the morning I check my feed reader (Fever) and many others check The New York Times or whatever. The point is most of us don’t walk to our doorstep or to the local newsstand and buy a paper to find out what’s happening in the world 12 hours after it happened. Words come to us in real-time from the streams we choose to follow.
Saturday a perfect storm unfolded between AT&T, the people of New York, and everyone with an interest in either. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to observe the reach of words on the internet. That is to say how quickly words travel. Story here
The Consumerist, with roughly 8 million unique visitors/month, published a story. They tweeted it. Mashable also published a story and sent it out via Twitter to its 1,863,998 followers. Friends retweeted the retweets and so on. On Monday the NYTimes, WSJ, NPR, and countless others jumped in.
The story didn’t wait for editorial confirmation, the rolling of the printing press, or the spin of PR. The writer went to AT&T’s website and had a chat with a customer service agent who confirmed the story, telling her “New York is not ready for the iPhone” (see the chat.) That agent probably doesn’t have a job today.
At 7:47pm I searched Twitter for “New York iPhone”. Let’s examine the first eight results. Combined, those first eight random Twitter users have 10,051 followers. That’s 10,051 people who potentially saw that story in 22 minutes. There are thousands of tweets behind these eight all going into an untold number of users’ streams. Social influence aside, you can’t argue with the numbers.
This isn’t a story about the shoddy job that AT&T did managing its business and its image, but the ease with which a guy from Brooklyn made his experience into a national headline. A dialog between a customer service agent and a random customer can become national news, quickly.
Every person with a computer, a phone, or a camera is a member of the real-time media. Stories that influence people come in the form of bytes, Tweets, feeds, and webpages and they come instantly. The only middleman between a person’s fingers and the people she can influence is, well, AT&T.
