The Voracious One-Eyed Monster and Mrs. Palin

Whatever you think about the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee (and heaven knows the internet is full of blogging and posting and opining on her), a recent incident (Sept. 8 to be exact) shows the viral fury of the internet off to full force. Around 2 pm, I somehow got wind of a blog-posting related to books Mrs. Palin allegedly wanted to ban from her local library. It was a good list. It was a long list. It started out with a catchy headline (Palin wanted to ban Harry Potter) and it grabbed me. But, having been around these internet fields for a while, the list seemed almost too good. So I probed a little and it seemed that the list had been smoked out as bogus. But not before I'd received an e-mail from a friend linking to the posting. And seeing today that the rumor spread like wildfire over the past 24 hours. How many people did it touch? I'll leave that to the metrics guys. What interests us from a communications point of view is that, in this case, whether or not it was true, it was the conversation that people WANTED TO BE TRUE. A self-fulfilling truth, if you will. Under the headline of a "you can't make this up" candidate, it seems that you can, in fact make it up. Or, as Jimmy Stewart says at the end of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence," when the legend disagrees with the truth, print the legend. The internet touches us all, glancing off us like shot from a shotgun, then disperses. How we use that velocity, the power of the 'one-eyed monster,' to start selling conversation, and to control them, well, that's the magic -- or danger. Thoughts?

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[Risk & Reward In Web 2.0 Marketing: Promax/BDA Panel]

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