With the power of the internet at our finger tips and the rush to distribute information as fast as we can type it, we can sometimes get caught up in the moment and fall victim to the double edged sword that is social media.
Never more was there a better example than an earlier posting by social media guru’s Penn-Olsen. Today site founder Sarah Chong ran with a story proclaiming that beverage giants Pepsi were to withdraw all funding from its advertising campaigns. It was proclaimed that as far as Pepsi were concerned there was no longer a need to ‘tell’ people how good their product was. From their point of view it was a tasty drink and they didn’t care whether people liked their product or not! (Eyebrows should already start to be raised right!)
Well you won’t be shocked to discover that the story was utter rubbish! In fact the source of the story was the American “news satire” website The Onion, a site renowned for its entertaining but non-factual articles (Read the Pepsi satire post). Well apparently Sarah Chong of Penn-Olsen wasen’t aware of this and took the story at face value. Once the gaff was realized (when I notified them) the post was promptly removed from the homepage (but not before I made a quick screenshot).
With the nature of society today it’s always a possibility that you are going to fall victim to a scam or believe a falsified story, but to fall hook, line and sinker to a story that’s so blatantly untrue is just inexcusable!
Such incidents are not uncommon online and if you want to keep that hard earned reputation that you have been working on building for so long it’s vital that you know where your information is coming from! Before you can say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious information is going to be out there on sites like Twitter to a potential audience of millions! It only takes a few moments to verify the how accurate a story is so what not do it?! FYI Wikipedia is NOT a valid source check!
Whether you’re gathering information for your latest blog post, or asking questions to improve your research, it never hurts to double- and triple-check your sources.
Edit: Since posting, the original story has reappeared in an edited format here and has been declared as an attempt at humor. At the time of posting everything was based upon the facts available.
Leave a Reply