Qantas to media: Don’t be twits
The dangers of Twitter in alerting news organisations to breaking news were exposed by the incident involving a Qantas A380 over Singapore last November, the airline says.
Qantas CEO Alan Joyce said media organisations should check the facts before running Twitter-created stories.
Joyce said the events of November 4 last year escalated to crisis level when Twitter reported that a Qantas A380 had crashed after one of its engines exploded over Indonesia.
“We first noticed a problem when our share price started to collapse, and that’s because of these reports coming out of Twitter,” Joyce told The World Today.
“They were reported by one mainstream media outlet on the basis of the Twitter reports that the aircraft had crashed in Indonesia and that started to obviously cause a problem with the share price,” he said.
Joyce says Qantas quickly confirmed the A380 had not crashed but was still in the air, and the airline issued a media release to correct the Twitter report.
Joyce urged journalists not to believe everything that is tweeted.
“I think it is important that major media outlets don’t pick up on
Twitter commentary and report it as fact, which is what happened in this case, and I think that was a bit disappointing,” Joyce said.
As a result of the A380 issue, Qantas is now active in social networking and teams monitor both Twitter and Facebook and respond to comments.
“In this modern day and age with social media, you have to be responsive immediately.
“You have to be out there with the facts very fast, so it’s changing the whole dynamic and speed to market that organisations like Qantas have to respond to.”
Ian Jarrett
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