Do you all remember the story, a blob from outer space lands and starts feeding.  Every time it feeds it gets bigger and more powerful, until it turns into an unstoppable force?

Now let's turn this allegory on its head and try to apply it to Social Media, or even rewind back to the email days.  Popular chain letters would circle the globe with words of wisdom, warning, humor, or just total BS.  I always found myself bombarded with many emails from very intelligent people that had innacurate content.

Fast forward to today, and there was an incident that occurred about a month ago that caught everyone's breath:

http://thechive.com/2010/08/10/girl-quits-her-job-on-dry-erase-board-emails-entire-office-33-photos/

I'm sure you remember, the girl that quit her job on whiteboards.  And then, IT SPREAD LIKE WILDFIRE.  I had at least 50 tweets come through in my Twitter stream and many references to it on Facebook.  I heard people offering to give her a job, commenting on her wit and candor, and loving her creativity.

It had everything it needed to make it viral:

• Easy to identify with story line
• The vanquished enemy/unlikable boss "Spencer"
• Wit and humor
• The Farmville revelation
• Thinking of what Spencer is going to have to do now that his gig was up
• A heroine who we all wanted to see be successful

And then the day after, we all found out it was a HOAX!

It had, in fact turned into "The Blob".  It was passed on so many times it turned into a self replicating blob with enough critical mass to sustain its own life.  If you wondered if it was real, but saw 25 other people you trusted talking about it, it must be real.  I took some time and went back through the conversations from the day before the hoax was uncovered, and realized that The Chive people made a lot of us look like buffoons for passing on this incorrect information. 

My takeaways from all this:

• It's easy to pass something along that sounds interesting, particularly if it was engineered to sound interesting.
• We did not check our sources.  If anyone dug into TheChive, they would have saw that it is a similar spoof site like The Onion.
• If this were something that we had passed it on to our members our customers, it would damage our value proposition and brand.

My challenge to everyone is to make sure you do a gut check and research before pressing "ReTweet", "Like", or "Share".  After all, you don't want to feed The Blob!

Garry Polmateer is Product Manager and Certified Salesforce Administrator & Consultant at NimbleUser.