Andrew Wallenstein sounds off on the silliness of social media “buzz” and all the reactionary…ummm…reactions that come along with it. Worth a read since it’s more than just your ordinary “ugh with the social media, remember when we could control that in our trade press weekly?” rant but really gets to how I think there’s a lot of “But what will our Twitter followers say” thinking that informs, rightly or wrongly, too many business decisions.

But as pervasive as this nonsense is, buzz is rapidly becoming quantifiable through a growing cottage industry of businesses that have made a specialty of filtering the noise on social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. There isn’t a media company out there that doesn’t partake of this kind of tracking in some shape or form to get a read on how consumers anticipate and receive their products. No wonder social analytics companies are becoming the must-have accessory to any self-respecting technology firm: Bluefin Labs was acquired by Twitter, SocialGuide went to Nielsen and, most recently and unexpectedly, Topsy rolled to Apple.

via It’s About Time for Social Media to Buzz Off | Variety.

I’ve got little to add to the hub-bub about what PR exec Justine Sacco said just before boarding a flight to South Africa and turning off her phone. Yes, the tweet was offensive. Yes, people were right to be offended by it. My friend Phil Gomes has a good post up about it that is well worth reading.

But what I will say are these few things:

First, this got ugly really, really fast. It went from a “heh, this woman’s going to have a rough time when she lands” to “Are we sure Google’s flight tracking is accurate? I want to make sure we have enough pitchforks” somewhere around hour five and never looked back. With Buzzfeed articles, “Real time marketing” posts that were in taste almost as poor as the original incident and so many people ready to pounce on her both at the airport and online, this was in my opinion a picture of what the worst use of social media looks like. It seemed as if we were all bored before the holiday and needed something to amuse ourselves, so we took to digitally stalking this woman, completely immune to the fact that this is a real person who’s life was about to be shaken. She ceased to be a fellow human being we share the planet with and became a meme with a heartbeat, someone whose existence we only acknowledge insofar as it entertained us. Once she had been devoured by the lion in the arena we went back to our idle pursuits, dreaming of what would be next to provide us momentary amusement. It was disgusting to watch.

And it makes me wonder what – or who – will be next? People say insensitive things online all the time. So when will the mob decide that X person is the next fodder for the machine? It could be any of us, at any time depending on the whims of who decides to be offended by what and how high their Klout score is. What makes Sacco any more or less deserving of being fed to the abettor than anyone else? Absolutely nothing.

This – the right to publish whatever we want, whenever we want with no editorial checks and balances – is a powerful weapon we’re wielding. Every tweet has the potential power of a shotgun blast, but it’s used mostly to share cat photos and promote our consulting businesses. Turn that power around, though, and you have something that can destroy lives and livelihoods.

You can make a strong argument in either direction, but I fall on the side of “No” when I consider whether she should have lost her job over this, which she did of course. Disciplinary action that serves as a wake-up call to not be stupid, sure. But firing? No. Yes, professional communicators need to be more careful and that could have been reflected in some HR action. But to let the mob rule those HR actions speaks to a system of which we have lost any semblance of control.

I’m not defending Sacco’s statement, not by a long shot. When you’re in a communications world you need to know what to say and what to not. So what she said was wrong, it was horribly offensive and should never be repeated in polite company. But that doesn’t justify the digital stalking that was done – including a fair amount by people who are otherwise stewards of the “don’t track me, bro” school of online privacy – of this woman became a macabre theater that, every bit as much as her tweet, has no place in polite and civil society.