While we’re all tired of the rhetoric coming out from all sides after the shootings in Arizona that killed a federal judge and wounded a member of Congress, it did point out one very important lesson. That social media in particular and the web in general never forget.
Sarah Palin is a case in point. Many people rushed to point out that the former Alaska governor had targeted many Democratic candidates – including the nearly assassinated Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords – in the November election with rifle sights. Palin’s team immediately tried to distance her from the incident and claimed that the graphic she had used was a surveyor’s mark, not a rifle sight.
But as Erik Sherman points out in a commentary on BNET, while it can be easy to start a social media campaign, it’s often far harder to control it afterward. So while Palin’s team quickly removed the controversial target map posting from her website after the shooting, the map remained in a note on Palin’s Facebook page. So even while her team is nearly obsessive about protecting her name and image, even they can miss these bits of unintended documented history and self-contradiction.
And while a Palin aide said that the target marks were surveyor marks, not rifle crosshairs, Mediaite noted that a Palin tweet contradicted the claim. It said “remember months ago ‘bullseye’ icon used 2 target the 20 Obamacare-lovin’ incumbent seats? We won 18 out of 20 (90% success rate; T’aint bad)” 
As Sherman says, that underscores a social media problem for businesses. How do you respond to a crisis and try to change a message when Facebook, Twitter, and the automatic archives of web sites such as the Internet Archive and Google retain messages forever?
Executives and companies need to remember that social media has a long memory and their use requires a sophisticated strategy.
