@buzzin_fly DJ Ben Watt posted what turned out to be the first online news of redundancies at the vitally important London venue. Within an hour there was plenty of RT action of his original post and the usual overexcited Twitter chatter confusing the issue. By the end of the afternoon things were getting fairly heated on the clubbing forums, forcing Ben to make a statement earlier today.

The one voice that everyone wanted/needed to hear remained deafeningly silent. In fact, as opposed to posting a statement on either their homepage news feed or blog, @fabriclondon contacted Ben and asked him to remove his earlier tweets. As anyone using Twitter (and indeed any web media tools) should really be aware, this is an utterly pointless exercise. It also fuels the gossipmongers no end.

There is still no mention of the rumours – which have of course now spread far beyond Twitter and the forums – on any of Fabric’s online profiles. This late reaction will do more damage to their reputation than gossip ever could. We questioned why it took so long for an official statement to go up on the Matter website last week, but with the venue’s closure and staff being given their marching orders, it was understandable that getting online was probably not the most pressing issue. It’s different this time though. The Fabric blog is still being updated with info about this weekend’s parties, so the wall of silence makes the situation seem dire, when clearly every effort will be being put into making sure the club continues to open as usual, if this is possible.

During times of internal turbulence, no company really wants to have to stand up in front of the public and make a statement until the dust at least begins to settle. But it’s an absolute necessity these days. And it can be done quite effectively in 140 characters. A chatty “will clear up all rumours shortly, open as usual” would have been good. Instead there is confusion leading up to one of the most lucrative holiday weekends in the clubbing year, inflicting both short and long-term damage to the club and it’s fantastic international brand.

It serves as a stark example of how even the most apparently slick, youthful media operations – that are fully blogged, Twittered and Facebooked up – are still a long way off having the digital strategy required to react properly to today’s real time web.

It is not enough to simply be using all these tools, our entire approach towards communications needs to be rethought in order to cope with them. Adapting is proving difficult for most people aged over 25 and most companies with managers over 25, but this absolutely needs to be embraced.

Hopefully Fabric and the many observers of this incident will use it to improve their digital strategy in the ways we often advocate here. Long may the club continue.

All this week we’re out in Mayrhofen, Austria, producing a real-time stream of news content for the official Snowbombing festival iPhone app by Eristoff – Vodka from the Land of the Wolf.

If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod Touch, download it for free while the event is taking place and let us know what you think. You’ll find news, gossip and interviews direct from the week-long festival, which sees artists like The Enemy, Editors, 2ManyDJs, De La Soul, Fatboy Slim, Vitalic, Doves and Friendly Fires playing to 6000 fancy dressed loons high up the Tyrolean alps.

Live Feeds

The app makes use of Alchemy Content’s specialist experience of developing and running mobile applications that go beyond the gimmicks; providing a useful, always up-to-date information service that’s constantly available in a user’s pocket.

Live feeds of high-quality custom content give people a reason to refer to the branded application repeatedly throughout their time at the event. For Snowbombing, we’ve devised an additional Eristoff Secrets feed, offering exclusive calls to action on things like VIP party access, ticket competitions and insider tips for getting the most from the resort.

Intense Usage

Mobile apps based around intense periods of usage, like major events or holiday locations work particularly well, so the Eristoff Snowbombing app is an ideal use of the technology and Alchemy Content’s editorial and project management services. See our Clubber’s Guide to Ibiza app for more.

GPS maps pinpointing and recommending local businesses, a fully searchable events schedule including artist profiles, plus user generated community feeds from YouTube, Flickr and Twitter all add to the application being an essential download for anyone – whether out at Snowbombing or not – with an interest in the artists or wanting an interactive guide to the best of Mayrhofen’s après ski.

Download the Eristoff Snowbombing app for iPhone or iPod Touch.

Twitter is far more established and important that it was even during Barak Obama’s famous social media election campaign. And the UK already loves to tweet during political TV shows like the BBC’s Question Time. It’s a real shame that the many Twitter-phobes are missing out on this important new dimension. One day soon, all big live events will have a feed of comments as a standard part of the broadcast. Then, status updates will be see for what they really are – far from egotistical personal broadcasts, they can be a simple but effective ways for any audience to participate in a communal event.

It’s fantastic that just as digital progress seems to signal the ‘end’ of event television by making almost everything available on-demand, we have a brand new medium for live events, that also has the added importance of immediate political weight.

The Chancellors Debate showed the shape of things to come once the party leaders have their TV showdowns. Of course the negative side of all this real-time digital commentary is that those in the spotlight become incredibly guarded and bland, plus attempt to exert way too much control. However, like it or not, this technology will play a vital role in the Election 2010. And this is really just the beginning of a new political era, so resistance to things like Twitter will have to simply fall away.

The Daily Mail and others may still find value in running daily scare stories about social networks and the anonymity of the internet for some time yet, but the next month will be an important move forward in the acceptance of all the ‘new’ media technologies – and how to use them effectively. Even if politics continues to annoy and baffle, hopefully the relevance and power of digital media will become clearer.

I can’t help feeling disappointed observing the glee many people are taking in the ‘battle’ to get Rage Against the Machine to Christmas No.1 over the usual syrupy X-Factor ballad. Yet again, a virtual-pitchfork wielding mob springs up on Facebook/Twitter, overexcitedly spitting bile about ‘sticking it to Simon Cowell’ and clearly relishing being members of some achingly cool, subversive arbiters of taste and democracy.

But since when was buying 3 copies of a track (that you may well already own) to push it artificially to Number 1 a victory for democracy? And when did subverting the mainstream Saturday night TV populism of X-Factor become about a pop music popularity contest of equally silly, mainstream proportions?

I suppose at least people are buying the music. Downloading ‘Killing In The Name Of’ from a torrent site would kinda miss the point (but I bet it’s still doing briskly on those too this week). Much has been made of the fact that Sony is behind both of the No.1 contenders anyway, so can’t lose, no matter how much ‘people power’ is exerted with a couple of lazy clicks of a mouse.

Odeous as Cowell can often seem, slagging him off on social networks just makes the “I’m buying RATM, yeah!” brigade seem more disenfranchised rather than powerful. Downloading singles is not ‘sticking it’ to any ‘man’. This over-excitement feels like the early days of email, when it seemed incredibly big and clever to send jokes to all your contacts. As the platform (or rather, its users) matured, the childish approach to its new thrills wore off. In 2010 we can expect plenty more mobs to spring up, since the social web is such a new cultural phenomenon. You get the feeling the possibilities are only just beginning to be realised.

Yes, this does give ‘the people’ some considerable new empowerment – the freedom of speech Twitter mob against Trafigura highlighted just how difficult it is for companies attempting to silence the free press – but the faux-rebellious #ratm4xmas campaign also proves how easy it is to mobilise huge numbers of people to join a ‘cause’ they have not thought very much about.

Culturally this is hugely negative. Comedians fear making their most cutting jokes without a ‘campaign’ springing up (@jimmycarr was satirising the lack of weapons for troops but still got pilloried for mocking disability) and politicians have to speak in such bland, cautious terms as to render most interviews pointless. And socially there are potential problems too. With the mob acting as real-time moral police, will groups advocating attacks on ‘peados’ whip up the necessary critical mass online to go and start throwing stones at the local ‘loaner’ without checking the facts of the case – almost certainly.

But this is all inevitable cultural fallout from the rapid assimilation of powerful new communications technology into the core of our daily lives. The mobs will spring up, but the excitement that a Christmas No.1 mob, or a ‘let’s get a rich celebrity sacked’ mob, and particularly the more extreme, hate-driven mobs can bring will surely wane once we’ve all got over how easy it is to make a shallow statement by adding your name to a Facebook group.

What interests me is what comes next. When we’ve collectively grown tired of the latest example of ‘people power’ hitting the headlines, how will these tools be used properly? Simon Cowell’s own ideas of a political X-Factor sound more than a little scary, but he certainly knows that asking the crowd in real-time is going to be far more significant in how we are governed, and by whom, in the near future.

And what forthcoming technological developments will have come along by the time we’ve all got used to these latest ones anyway? The playing field is likely to have changed repeatedly before we’ve had a chance to get comfortable. Living in this new world will require a high degree of media savvy of us all. So, if #ratm4xmas acts as the UK’s ‘email joke’ moment in the evolution of social media campaigning then it might yet prove to have had a little bit of substance. And ok, it has belatedly become a charity fundraising project too, so I don’t want to sound entirely like Scrooge here. Merry Christmas!

Forget the latest social media trends, communications fads and all those lofty opinions on the future of Twitter. The one thing that has emerged as a modern essential (one I believe we will soon consider on a par with having a phone number, or a listed postal or email address), is the status update.

It makes perfect sense in an age dominated by information, that we all provide a short ‘headline’ about what we are up to as part of our contemporary suite of work and social tools. We’re fast approaching a time when not to have a status update of some sort will feel as socially awkward as not having a mobile became in the late 1990s. And for businesses, it will be unthinkable.

It’s interesting to see the mobile operators and device manufacturers rushing into this space now (see the Vodaphone video below). The range of options they offer shows that this isn’t exclusively about Twitter, Facebook or any other brand. It’s also not about celebrity, or society’s obsession with self-importance, or an invasion of privacy, or a time consuming distraction. It’s a maturing of how we all use real-time social media in a way that isn’t overwhelming. It’s a practical method of communicating now we are all so instantly, permanently connected. An inevitable evolution of communication, no less. Ok, so it’s one that hasn’t featured in much sci-fi so makes us feel odd about our ideas of the future, but is ultimately very human.

Train Your Brain

The headline feed, whether this be news, marketing messages, blog posts or a public SMS from a friend’s mobile are the ultimate way to cope with and condense a torrent of real time information. Excellent free tools like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite help us to make sense of this as the feeds themselves become a flood. The mobile app and the personal website become important again as aggregators of particular feeds.

Our brains need to get to grips with this new way of receiving information, and its rapid advance is causing plenty of friction and resistance… of course. But the technology is guiding the way. Limiting the text characters (originally down to the basic restrictions of SMS) forces us to be brief and trains our minds to express ourselves in the concise way necessary today.

As society becomes more comfortable with sending and consuming information in this way, as yet unthought-of possibilities become apparent, both good and bad. Witness last week’s #trafigura and #janmoir outrage incidents (Twitter mobs could become a real problem, even if they can be mobilized for good), or the innovative #beatcancer charity drive. The best advice can only be that we all embrace the coming of the status update and train ourselves to be savvy as its cultural importance grows. What’s clear is that the pace of change isn’t going to stop, so those who remain resistant put themselves at an increasing disadvantage.

Such topics are to be discussed from a brand perspective at Media140 London on 26th October, a one-day conference on the impact of real-time media. Alchemy Content will be there, and we have a discount code for £40 off the ticket price for the first five people to buy a Media140 ticket using our exclusive promo code: E8NZAHJH. That makes it a very affordable £95.

Video for Vodaphone’s new 360 service, that is heavily geared towards the importance of status updates…

But, with a couple of other celeb deaths today, the intriguing ‘news’ out there at the moment is of the ‘death’ of Jeff Goldblum in a fall while on a movie set, and of Harisson Ford variously going missing on a boat/helicopter, presumed crashed. We read they are both currently working on the same movie. I’d love to know the origins of these ‘stories’. Could it even have a distant PR connection?

Every week we see how tools like Twitter are shaping the instant nature of global communication – and how the worst, gossipy tendencies of us as a species are magnified along with the unquestionably liberating power that comes with all this too.

At times like this the mainstream newspaper sites start to look a vital, rather than shaky proposition. But newsrooms deciding on tomorrow’s headlines have got a tough task trying to keep up with the user driven aspects of an ‘event’ story like MJ tonight. They also better beware of printing misinformation pulled from any source (Jackson ‘suicide’, anybody?) – trust no site until this gossip frenzy has calmed down.

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.

Seeing as Miami’s Winter Music Conference is now in full swing, we’ve been monitoring social media activity around the annual orgy of electronica. (Ok, so it’s a poor second to actually being out there. Poolside. In the sunshine. But it’s as close as we’re getting this time).

While there’s unquestionably more content than ever in terms of regular blogging, live streams (check out the new Awdio), pics and tweets going up ‘as it happens’, tracking this coverage down is a real hit and miss affair.

The experience highlights the shortcommings of Google when it comes to real-time and current events searching. Twitter search is better for catching links to live/fresh content, however the results are dominated by people saying ‘wishing I was at WMC’ as opposed to actual relevant media from out there.

Huge events like WMC really lend themselves to all kinds of digital media experimentation. When we reach a point where all the material can be easily found in one place everyone will benefit.

The Kyte player above is a project we worked on at Ministry of Sound during WMC 2008. I thought more people would be onto this kind of ‘live from my mobile’ footage this year, but phone livecasting is yet to capture the collective imagination (so far…) and they are all probably too busy enjoying their poolside strawberry daquiris right now anyway.

One look at the papers tells you that our favourite micro-blogging service has well and truly been picked up as the ‘trend du jour’ by the UK press.

From freesheets to broad ones, vast columns are currently stuffed full of Twitter related chatter. Be it lazy reporting on yesterday’s celebrity tweets, or repeated discussions of whether the platform ‘has become mainstream’ yet, it’s difficult to escape.

This obviously rubs some people up the wrong way. Witness the haters deriding Twestival on the Guardian PDA blog. And all that bile aimed at a charity event!

It actually really excites me when an emerging communications medium gets slagged off. Then you know it’s already challenging the status quo. Twitter is now so completely mainstream (how edgy can something that Phillip Schofield is using on This Morning really be?), but because the gulf between those who accept and use social media and those who don’t, or won’t, is so sharp, you can get the false feeling that using things like Twitter is still the preserve of a clued-up few.

It reminds me of when I owned a mobile phone back at college in 1995. I was hardly an early adopter, yet among my fellow students at the time, having it was considered totally bizarre. “But what on earth do you need it for?” was the regular question, along with sniggering about looking like a drug dealer or city slicker. And this was on a media and communications degree.

Sure the volume of bandwagon-jumping press stories and the cutesy twlingo is annoying. And as the experience of platforms from Friends Reunited to MySpace has shown, an explosion of up-take is no guarantee that your system is about to replace email just yet.

However it’s fairly safe to say that Twitter has proved that micro updates have a huge role to play in the future of how we communicate. (Way beyond having slightly weird ‘relationships’ with celebrities and being bombarded with impersonal PR messages, too.)

Fierce resistance is all part of the process these new tools undergo in becoming an essential part of our lives, but it will be quickly forgotten. After all, who thinks having a mobile phone is ridiculous today?

Brits have shown the world just how preoccupied with the weather we really are via the medium of Twitter. The dumping of a few inches of snow and the subsequent, inevitable shut down of Our Roman/Victorian era transportation network lead a lot of people to be stuck at home Twittering about the ‘arctic’ conditions.

The #uksnow tag was beating even #superbowl at certain stages on Monday, highlighting the huge leap in popularity of the micro blogging platform in the UK in the last few weeks.

Within hours of the first flake falling, a Google Map mashup was inviting people rate the snow in their postcode out of 10 with a simple Twitter text message.

Then once workers realised they weren’t possibly getting to the office, the avalanche began. #uksnow comments dominated the conversation – and to some extent still do right now. Photo service Twitpic featured a hell of a lot of snowmen and ‘picture postcard’ back garden scenes, and some genuinely useful travel information was also available too.

It was an exemplary show of the shared national joy/misery that a bit of snow causes us (that must have proved thoroughly unfathomable to people in other snow-prone climbs), but is the Twitter response just the latest social network fad? Certainly the hastily arranged flash event in Trafalgar Square @snowballfight smacked of trying too hard.

It seems unlikely that the Great British public will rush to post an image of their back garden every time it snows from now on. So to that extent we are witnessing the excitement at discovering a new toy. Yet the whole episode also reveals how people wish to use their media these days – to natter about the issues of the day in real time, and to have a nose around to see what other people are experiencing. The most basic human social instincts catered for in 140 character text messages and endlessly similar grainy photos.

It all hints towards the ways we’ll be communicating in the near future, even if it seems a bit silly now. The news networks, (who have really gone overboard with their coverage of the conditions), will take the hardest hit when people automatically turn to Twitter for all they need to know about shared events like this in real-time. It may only be text messaging, but the service has already proved it’s superiority as a medium, and we know this is only early days…