News of a potential global flu pandemic is content gold for news outlets. Did anyone see the Sky News feature running yesterday complete with gratuitous scary music?! With the continuing assault on ad revenues and competition for audiences, it’s fair to say that this sort of story is going to be worked for all it’s worth.

With the professional media pushing the hype levels into overdrive for their own reasons, the gossip driven world of social media is understandably awash with even more made up nonsense and irresponsible scaremongering.

Certainly a quick dip into the flow of #swineflu tweets provides some wildly inflated, totally unofficial death tolls, misinformation about eating pork and, of course, plenty of ‘this is God’s punishment’ type messages. If this does become the first pandemic of a wired world, the effects of all this chatter could create unnecessary panic and seriously compound the problems. But one way that authorities charged with minimising the impact of the outbreak could counteract our natural urge to sensationalise would be to be on top of technologies like Twitter with their official voice.

As we are constantly saying, today’s media is about the conversation. And the channels of that communication are constantly developing. Organisations will be left behind if they don’t keep abreast of the very latest ways to get their message across, particularly when there is the sudden need to act fast, as in this Swine Flu case.

Even with a full, official digital profile in place, the hype will still be circulating at pace via all forms of media. At times like these it’s hugely important for us all to take a savvy, level-headed approach to all we read, no matter what the source.

People are probably already better at filtering messages than we collectively believe they are, but human nature is still prone to herd mentality. As an exercise in developing media filtering skills, something that we’re going to need to be really good at, this particular news story could be one of our biggest tests yet.

Check out Mashable’s list of ways to track swine flu coverage properly.