Epic fail. But whose?

We've become used to public relations people who don't understand social media. Take for instance #McDStories, in January, the campaign that asked patrons to share their heart-warming McDonald's experiences. What the fast food chain got instead was a trending topic - of bad experiences with the brand.

Or how about the guys at Mars Incorporated, who wanted to “user-generate” their Web site content by populating the Skittles chocolate site with all the tweets that mentioned “Skittles”. As soon as consumers cottoned on that the stream was not being checked, it became a Twitter-wide challenge to come up with the dirtiest, most offensive 140-character piece of work including the word Skittles.

It was, therefore, completely believable when Shell launched its Arctic Ready campaign across the social networks a few weeks ago that soon turned into an equal farce.

The campaign centred on a Web site, still to be found at http://arcticready.com, and its “Let's Go Social” competition. Using a poster generator and supplied pictures of the Arctic, site visitors are encouraged to create an advertisement for Shell's Arctic mission. The winner, says the site, will have his/her advert used on a billboard.

In no time, the Arctic Ready site was covered in anti-oil posters, and it had become a social media fail for the books. Silly Shell, didn't it know this would happen?

Well, the creators of the Web site did know, but the creators were not Shell.

The Arctic Ready campaign was a team effort by Green Peace and The Yes Men - a group that impersonates corporates and politicians for the express purpose of making them appear foolish. You can read all the details of the campaign on their blog.

By the time the real owners of the site came to light, though, it was already too late for Shell - the Web site had “gone viral”. It had been tweeted and blogged, and even, lending legitimacy to the whole affair, been reported on in the mainstream media.

The more content became freely available online, the more need there was for trusted content.

Tallulah Habib, social media activist, ITWeb

Here's where, in my opinion, it stops being a funny story and turns into a serious problem. It's one thing for blogs and social media to carry an incorrect story. But for journalists, trained in fact-finding and whose work is subject to editorial checks and balances, to be caught off guard, may be the first real symptom of the death of the press.

When blogging started to become popular in the early 2000s, it was seen as a threat to journalism, because suddenly every citizen could be a journalist. Anyone could publish news. It soon became evident, however, that journalism's death had been greatly exaggerated. While anyone could publish news, not everyone could get itright. The more content became freely available online, the more need there was for trusted content.

Then social media came along, and again the media was scared. Stories were breaking on Twitter first - for instance, the death of Osama Bin Laden - and more people were reading news based on social recommendation than from trusted titles.

In some cases, it seems that's where the wheels fell off. Getting a story out there first, making it sensational and “viral”, became more important than the truth. Without the truth, though, without fact-checking and balances, what is journalism? Nothing but a blog.

The social media audience has become used to hoaxes. Every second day a celebrity “dies” on Twitter and fake Facebook news is often used to spread malware. When we read something on a social network and it seems a little odd, the first step we take is to find it in the news. If it's there, on our favourite news portal, we'll accept it as fact.

Yes, Green Peace may have been irresponsible, tricking people into spreading its anti-Arctic message virally. Yes, The Yes Men are incredibly good at what they do. However, what really lent the whole saga legitimacy was when it was picked up by the media.

Shame on you, Shell, for drilling in the Arctic. Shame on you, Green Peace, for your guerrilla tactics. But mostly, shame on the media that posted news articles about this and about sensational stories like it, without doing your own research. The public is depending on you for the truth, but if this is the new status quo, they won't be for long.