How One Man’s Love For A Goat Teaches Us About Social Media

In 2007 I had a disconcerting number of conversations about bestiality.  Like many others I was fascinated by the story of the Sudanese man forced to “marry” a goat after being caught in flagrante by the goat’s owner.

For weeks the story stayed resolutely in the BBC’s most read section, it was emailed to me by friends and acquaintances across the globe (get me) and hours of pub time were devoted to Charles Tombe and whether forced marriage to the animal in question was a punishment likely to put off other would-be animal lovers.

Matthew Yeomans talked in last week’s lecture about social media and the power of the internet to propel a story way beyond its usual audience. He mentioned Greenpeace as a prime example of an organisation that used all the technological tools at its disposal (YouTube, blogs) to spread their message to as wide a readership as possible, to “punch above their weight”.

The Tombe story is another illustration of the magnifying power of the web. Could Charles Tombe ever have conceived that millions of people round the world would hear about his humiliation? That office workers would read it over lunch, school boys would send it round on Facebook and that long after the event blogs like this one would flag it up once more to the uninitiated?

Perhaps if he’d known, old Charles would have gritted his teeth and hurried home for a cold shower.

This Telegraph piece, one of a number of follow-ups in the national press, gives a good account of how the story snowballed. But the most interesting revelation it contains is that this story was never actually put on the Juba Post website.

The BBC were as shocked by the story’s staying-power as anybody according to this blog. Matthew Yeomans talked about the half life of the internet and this story broke into the public consciousness over a year after it was first on the BBC.

So how did this go from a small piece in the print edition of a Sudanese paper to my friends and I guffawing in a pub in the suburban West Midlands? The BBC got the ball rolling but from then on it was all about networks, people passing this story onto people. The big media organisations could only jump on the bandwagon as and when there was a space.

These are the new rules.

We talk about media and trust but it is a world away from the kind of real trust we have for our friends and family. If one of my friends links to a story on Facebook, or Twitter, I am almost certain to read it.

It’s easy to ridicule Sarah Palin (no really, have a go!) but the scorn poured on her over her failure to name a paper she reads is misplaced. So she doesn’t sit down with a copy of the New York Times every morning? Fewer and fewer people do.

That paper wrote an excellent piece last week that Matthew Yeomans quoted from. The article cites Google CEO Eric Schmidt warning that the Web would become a “cesspool of useless information” unless the big, trusted brands survived.

But this survival is not inevitable. Internet commentator Dan Farber wrote gloomily this week that,

“People are willing to settle for content of generally less value that is free of charge.”

This challenge for us as journalists is to reverse this trend, to make sure our work is better than that of the untrained, unchecked and unbalanced (sometimes in both senses of the word) blogger. Let others worry about advertising revenue, all we can do is ensure that we are writing is something that others will want, and need, to read.

So lets’s step up and take the bull by the horns. (No Charles, it’s a metaphor).