President Roosevelt once eloquently said, “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.”

In the last 48 hours fear has outweighed actual facts and reason.

The histrionic media coverage of the potential for a pandemic of swine flu disease, in light of only a few hundred cases, has elicited fear globally. It got exacerbated with the new swine flu Twitter service, launched Sunday morning with only 50 users who had signed up to receive the latest swine flu news, and which grew exponentially, in the thousands, within 24 hours.

According to an article by Eric Bland posted on MSNBC on April 28,  “Powerful disease-tracking tools, including those currently monitoring the spread of swine flu across the world, were once reserved for officials at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). No longer. Today, anyone can see the spread of diseases such as swine flu in real time, and alert public health officials to potential new cases by using Google, and now, Twitter.”

Twitter tracking makes me nervous… The popularity of swine flu on Twitter presents both a boon and burden for the CDC.

According to John Browstein, a physician at Children’s Hospital Boston (CHB) who, along with fellow CHB computer scientist Clark Friefeld, created the HealthMap swine flu tracking service said that, “the Health Map was too slow for the amount of information we’ve been accumulating, so we had to switch to a Twitter feed instead.”  The benefits are clear.  The more people who use the site, the sooner an outbreak can be reported and the sooner public health officials can work to contain it.  Moreover, tweets can note emerging cases or community outbreaks in real time.

But Twitter tracking also presents a burden.  According to Bland, “so much information can lead to false positives and install public fear.”  Tweets are obviously scientifically unreliable and, as such, present a real danger that statistically incorrect data can spread virally.

Although swine flu is big on the social networking site, tweeting has a responsibility when it comes to a health issue.  Comments like, “Maybe my computer has this swine flu thing” as said by user Ifoch, are out of place.

Tracking such a serious disease on Twitter should be taken with “a grain of salt.”  One would hope that HealthMap would use blogs and Twitter messages sparingly.

(update from the January 7th blog)

Classical music got a “facelift” yesterday, thanks to the forward-thinking creative people who were behind the performance at Carnegie Hall on April 15, of the first YouTube Symphony Orchestra. “Facelift” in the sense that classical music garnered attention and respect from a generation steeped in social media, one that generally relegates classical music to “that history stuff” or the “long haired” variety of music.

I get why that generation thinks that.  If you have ever been to a Symphony Orchestra performance and looked around at the attending public, you might have noticed that there were very few ‘40 somethings’ in the audience.  Other than music students, the general audience was more composed of the over 50s kind, and that’s being generous with age.  It has something to do with the fact that music education in our public schools stopped decades ago, when the support for the arts diminished dramatically.  So it is not surprising that young adults today offer a befuddled look, when asked if they prefer Mozart or Tchaikovsky.

But for now, classical music has been jolted to new popularity by two events – one, an ingenious mash up of musicians that formed an Internet Orchestra, each of whom recorded their own video of their musical part of famed Dan Tan’s new composition in their own home or studio in some 70 countries, and the other, a very real live performance by 95 musicians who were selected out of 3,000 musicians, ages 17-55, to perform in Carnegie Hall, New York City, under the baton of conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

How wonderful is that… Just think, as Anthony Tommasini, music critic for the New York Times, put it in his review of the concert on April 16, “YouTube deserves a lot of credit.  After all, they could have sponsored a YouTube International Basketball Team.”

Indeed.

Tommasini also opinionated that this event has altered the audition process — forever.  He must have been speaking about orchestral musicians who traditionally send discs to audition for philharmonics, or even travel to audition live.

But I say that much more has been triggered. The Internet Orchestra as well as the YouTube Symphony has presented the classical music genre with a new frontier, by boldly venturing out of comfortable 2-3000 seat concert halls and onto the wide arenas of the Internet.  Not that there haven’t been concerts and Master Classes on the web to date, but never on this scale.

Maybe the web can do what the schools and concert organizations have failed to do – expose the public-at-large to the wonders of classical music.

Domino’s nightmare this week was very, very real indeed.  And it didn’t go away the next morning, as most nightmares do.  Far from it.  The damage spiraled without a safety net. The video that circulated on YouTube showing disgusting and filthy antics from a server in preparing a pizza, was so revolting that it could not easily be dismissed simply as corporate mischief or a prank, as the two employees who were responsible for posting the video, claimed.

A story like this is ripe for a flurry of activity on social-media channels and it certainly bounced around on Twitter, expanding exponentially the damage already inflicted on the brand.  It didn’t help that a photo of the server picking his nose also circulated in the mainstream media. (See International Herald Tribune April 16.)

Damage control from Domino’s came two hours after the video was posted – quick enough for offline, but not quick enough for online.  A comment or prank needs to be spotted as it happens — in real time, putting a strain on company personnel but, never-the-less, needed.

Sadly I say, that irretrievable damage was done. The issue is that the video struck a nerve on a low-lying consumer fear — best put by Brian Moressey, on his post on AdFreak saying, “Let’s face it, everyone worries what goes on behind the scenes at fast-food places.”  No real comfort here.

Bruce Horovitz’ article in USA TODAY, reported not only on the incident, but also offered solutions for safeguarding a brand.  The only real safety net is to stay online following consumers and their conversations on major social media channels, staying tuned 24/7 and basically becoming part of the conversation — and react accordingly.

Similarly, just think of a living room conversation that continues as you leave the room for just a few minutes – let’s say to go into the kitchen — and when you return, you can’t quite pick up on the conversation because you missed several critical points.

Still, per the International Herald Tribune on 4/16 “Domino’s gets lesson on Web crisis reaction” the whole incident was a scam.  Scam or not, I anticipate that Domino’s nightmare will have crisis planning gurus everywhere puling their client’s plan off the shelf and adding a few such potential disastrous scenarios to it, with next steps solutions clearly planned out.

Scam or not, I suspect that the incident has left its mark on some consumers who may get the “hibbie-jibbies” about ever eating at Domino’s again.

I noted in an article in the International Herald Tribune of April 13, that frugality has once again become popular, turning it into something of a ‘sport’ rather than a sacrifice, as we figure out how clever we can be to do more, with less.  Who would have thought?

Moreover, I marveled at the turnaround for savings, which have spiked up to 5%, since the low of 1% last November.  This is atypical for the American psyche, as seen in recent history.  According to Martha Olney, economic professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “This is huge.  In recessions, consumers usually save less money.  Not this time. It implies a re-emergence of thrift as a value.”

Frugality has had many cycles.  In the days of our grandparents, to be frugal was virtuous, in other words, “the right thing to do.”  Showing excess was thought to be bad taste.  Well, we all know where that went.  Excess, or its synonym, self-indulgence, became a raison d’être, a ‘must have’ if you will in recent decades — and finally spun out of control, bringing the global financial world to its knees.

Frugality has become a hot topic.  Web sites are sprouting up daily such as Allthingsfrugal.com where you can click on Frugal Food, Frugal Parenting, Frugal Beauty and even Frugal Inspirational, whatever that is.  Then there is Strecher.com and, in particular, Meetup.com that started a member group called “Tightwads United.”

Given that frugality has taken on the feel of a ‘sport’, it is my sense that these sites have not just sprouted up for the ever-growing jobless ranks, but more as a challenge to those who wish to test themselves as to cleverness, in the face of need.

In riding the frugality wave, it is clear that it will take ingenuity, originality, inventiveness and creativity to turn the tide for individuals as well as companies and organizations.  It’s all about judgment as to what to do with what is available, how to be resourceful with pared down means and how to re-purpose tools that help one stay above water in a changing landscape.

Of course, I knew it would happen.  Ghost writers have invaded the intimacy of “tweetidom” according to an article by Noam Cohen printed in the International Herald Tribune last week.

Apparently high-profile celebrity twitterers, some with a following of hundreds of thousands of people, got bored, tired or too busy to continue to twitter and hired ghost twitterers to do the job they had intended to do themselves in the first place.

In this transparent world, it is downright disappointing…

This really violates the original concept of Twitter, which was founded on the premise that fans would have a direct connection, an intimacy if you will, with the rich and famous. Ghost twitterers are breaking that premise.

Not so with corporate or political tweets. There has always been a tacit understanding that staffers or assigned representatives do the tweeting. This follows along the original Twitter premise, for organizations to have an open dialogue format and direct interaction with consumers or the public-at-large.  In this case it does not matter who tweets, as long as the communication is interactive and honest.

But with individuals, celebrities or not, there is an assumption that the contact is direct and personal.  I cannot imagine that when fans find out that they have been following a celebrity ghost twitterer, that they will take it lightly. The trust factor will be tarnished and could easily lead to a mass exodus of disillusioned followers.

Moreover, in the case of celebrities, I am not sure that followers will knowingly want to hear from yet another layer of handlers who pick and choose what tweet to post or write those that fit in with the public persona being created, or one that follows a particular promotional strategy.  And then, considering the speed of daily tweets, most ghost twitterers will tweet with their own voice by necessity, rather than that of their client.

So much for direct contact…

The idea that someone else is doing the tweeting for the likes of rapper 50 Cent or Britney Spears, who is currently actively recruiting ghost twitterers — is absurd.  If that becomes the norm, then Twitter will simply meld into the Hollywood marketing mix, lose its original innovative intent and then fade away.

Some get it.

According to Cohen’s article, Shaquille O’Neal said,  “If I am going to speak, it will come from me,” adding that the technology allows him to bypass the media to speak directly to the fans. And Lance Armstrong, only hours after breaking his right collar bone, tweeted about it himself, while Charlie Villanueva, a forward for the Milwaukee Bucks, tweeted at halftime from the locker room on March 15 about how “I gotta step up.”

Is it really so hard to think through and type in 140 characters every so often?