Have you ever heard someone from the mainstream media say “oh those bloggers don’t actually break any stories, they are just leeches that comment on stories broken by REAL journalists”?

Well I beg to differ.

The subject of a podcast I did back in February has become “A Story” in the mainstream media. I thought it might be instructive to look at what happened along the way, as it’s a good example of how social media can have an impact.

Back in February I did a podcast about Livewire, a new social network for sick kids, developed by The Starlight Children’s Foundation and partially funded by the Federal Govt in Australia. I was approached by the company’s PR firm, Howorth, and asked if I’d like to interview Omar Kalifa, Managing Director, and Cinnamon Pollard, Partnership and Marketing Manager. Although I don’t normally agree to do many stories for PR companies, as this one involved a good idea – a social network for sick kids – I agreed to chat with them.

During the interview I asked them how they managed to spend $14.7 million on a social network that’s only designed to have 20,000 users and I wasn’t very convinced by their answers.

Over the next couple of months, a few smart bloggers picked up the story from where I left off and drilled down further on the numbers, with special credit going to Nathan Bush and Matt Granfield’s excellent post. Then Tim Burrowes mentioned it on Mumbrella and within a few days I had several journos calling me, saying they were working on a story about it for their papers.

It ended up in the Sydney Morning Herald on April 26. Journo Rachel Browne didn’t get much more out of the Livewire folks than I did months earlier. But this was the first time the mainstream media had covered the story and, hopefully, it will get more people asking questions about where the money went.

(Nathan Bush has written a great overview of the social media background on the story here.)

I don’t want to make a big deal out of it – this isn’t exactly Watergate – but I do think it demonstrates how social media can have an impact.

However – this story isn’t finished yet. Mainstream media are often guilty of letting stories disappear. The “news cycle” passes and they move onto other things and the story gets dropped.

We in the social media, though, can keep stories like this alive by blogging about them regularly. I’m going to put a note in my diary to follow up on this every 30 days. At the moment, if you Google “livewire”, their site comes up in first place but none of the stories written about them in the blogosphere appear on the first couple of pages.

I believe the real impact we in social media can have is occupying high ranking positions in a company’s googlerank so when someone goes looking for information on said company, they discover our stories and, in this case, our concerns.

So please – if you’re as concerned as I am about where this money went, blog about it. Tweet about it. Talk about it. Don’t let it disappear.

From the LA Times:

Ignore Twitter? Major brands learn they’d better respond — and quick. Separate incidents involving CNN, Amazon and Domino’s Pizza reveal that fluency in the evolving language of digital public relations comes easier to some companies than others.

It’s a good article that explores some of the positive and negative aspects of Twitter for large brands circa early 2009. Just because your brand hasn’t been affected yet, doesn’t mean it won’t be next. Can you afford to stick your head in the sand and pretend it won’t happen to you?

It’s important that as an online community we learn to deliberately use our combined strength to punish companies and individuals who try to toxify our social networks with spam, lies and rubbish. We are the gatekeepers. We might not be able to stop people sending pollution into the stream every once in a while, but we can Name ‘Em and Shame ‘Em when they do. We can toxify their GoogleRank so anyone who searches for the brands or their agencies or the people who do their dirty work will find out that they have major negative whuffie.

The first company that I think needs to be shamed is Naked Communications in Sydney. They are the agency behind the appalling “Are You My Man In The Jacket?” video.

This dates back to January. This video got a lot of mainstream media coverage and then was revealed to be a fake.

This isn’t clever. This is lying. This is straight out manipulation. This is everything that’s wrong with the world of advertising and PR. What’s worse is that the agency behind it, Naked Communications, thought that their exercise in lying was justified because of the numbers.

Unfortunately, the people on YouTube have a different story. The video on YouTube has a 250,000 views and a two-star rating. Sure – lots of people saw it – but they think it’s crap. What’s worse is that most of the talk about this ad in the blogsphere, like over here on Media Bistro, is about what douches Naked and their client, Witchery, are.

Is that the kind of buzz a client wants? People talking about how much you suck?

So what do we do about it? All we can do is get the message out there, so corporate advertisers and their agencies hear us loud and clear – what we want from you is an honest and open conversation, not LIES and DECEPTION. And if you don’t give it to us, we will tell the world. Anytime anyone searches on “Naked Communications” or “Witchery” they should get a page of Google results talking about how we don’t like being lied to.