I came across an article (Web still has central role in Markoff case) on the front page of the Boston Metro today (see similar article on the New York Metro - 'Craigslist Killer' case spins in cyberspace) and was just intrigued by the role the Internet is turning out to have on this still-ongoing case.
The crux of the article - that caught my attention - was how both law enforcement and supporters of the hitherto suspect (Markoff's friends emphasize the fact that he is innocent until proven guilty) have turned to Web 2.0 technologies to advance their cases.
According to the report, the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office had posted a message on Craigslist in a bid to encourage other possible victims of violence as a result of transactions from similar Craigslist postings (while I couldn't locate that post, I did find a related post byMike Celizic, a MSNBC TODAYShow.com contributor who advises ladies to be cautious; see also MSNBC's interview with Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster about his company's involvement in this case). This is said to be the first time the DA office is using such a measure as a means of trawling the Web for other potential victims who may be languishing in silence.
While government traditionally tends to rely on conventional media as the main vehicle to get the word out, we see that even they are leveraging on the WWW by getting the word out in the affected community and hoping that any feedback would propel them towards a quicker resolution of the case. While I wouldn't call this a PR 2.0 effort, it is an example of an effective use of the right community as a listening post or an inbound communication channel.
But countering this is a Facebook group called 'Phil Markoff is Innocent Until Proven Guilty' where its members (currently at 204, and growing!) are making a stand against what they describe as presumptuous media culture that has basically 'decided' that Markoff is guilty of the murder of Brisman, even though the case is still being deliberated.
I certainly applaud the efforts of the latter because it is yet another testimony of how far public discourse has come, especially with the transformative impact of the WWW and Web 2.0 technologies. What would've perhaps been a laborious paper-based petition (or remember those email-chain petitions where you just added your name and forwarded it to a friend hoping he/she would do the same and keep the chain going?) that still needed to be brought to the traditional media's attention to give it a more 'viral' potency, has now, because of the digital age, been taken online. In the same breath, lay people like you and I, and in this case, Phil Markoff's friends and sympathetic community, are empowered to do something to get the word out (it is useful to think of this as an outbound communication campaign).
No matter how this case pans out, it's definitely a live PR 2.0 exercise worth studying - especially how social media is being applied by the lay community to counter not to much the government's information campaign, but the media's perceived agenda-setting function.
Keep watching this space!