If you happened to catch my previous post, you may have been wondering what had prompted Britain to start defending the NHS on Twitter.
Well, Dave Cushman (Disclosure – friend and former colleague), has a nice summary of the factors he feels were involved in the creation and spread of #welovethenhs.
They include the fact that something many people cared about was attacked, it’s a belief that could be shared by many people who had been emotionally affected, and the tools etc were really quick and simple to use to get involved.
It did have a small bit of celebrity involvement from British comedy writer Graham Linehan, but I suspect this trend had it’s own momentum.
Of course, as a further postscript to the image from my previous post – within the same day Les Paul had died
Dave also raised the issue of how newspapers and organisations feel odd when they’re reporting on Twitter – as I wrote before, this is the stage where we finally accept that TV, Radio, Internet and Mobile have made print-based newspapers into paper archives. There’s still a place for them, but if you were able to study the numbers of people discovering breaking news of a specific event on Twitter, for example, and compared that with those seeing it for the first time, I would be that one is increasing almost as fast as the other is falling. And that is without considering how many people would hear about the event, e.g. Michael Jackson dying, from friends/colleagues/family before they got near a newspaper.