Claude turned me onto a recent blog post by Jeremiah Owyang on the topic of successful (and not so successful) examples of social media engagement. Entitled “Damage Control: Social Media Reversals” he takes four very interesting examples of companies responding to incidents in the social media space, and deconstructs them to see where they went right or wrong.

One particular example struck me as being what social media is really all about. The incident was one where a YouTube member, Levinator25, posted a video of a bug (or “glitch” as everyone’s been calling it) in EA Sports Tiger Woods Golf, where you could get Tiger Woods to actually walk on water, to take a shot off a ball that landed in the middle of a pond. Appropriately entitled the “Jesus Shot”, the video has received over 900,000 views to date. Electronic Arts, had an interesting and humorous response. They approached Brian Levi, the member’s real name who made the post, and then actually got Tiger Woods to star in a video they then posted on YouTube as a response. In it Tiger is seen to walk on water to take a shot from the middle of a pond, just like in the original video. EA’s tag line: “It’s not a glitch — he’s just that good!”

The response was fantastic and instantly went viral. This illustrates one of the key characteristics of social media that can easily be missed, which is that it’s not a simple exchange between two or three or a few people online. It is in fact a lot like watching a debate or performance. There are the actors involved, but then there is a whole passive, and often silent audience that views the exchange. And while they may be silent, they do form and have opinions on what has transpired. In this particular case, EA showed itself to be social media savvy, not just because it was able to directly engage one high profile YouTube member, but because it also understood that it was engaging all the other YouTube viewers who had seen the video, and all the future viewers as the video went viral. A very smart move on their part, that has reached over four million viewers to date (and largely for the cost of just making the response video). It’s easy to see that companies that aren’t at least aware of what is going on in this space, might be missing out on some great opportunities.