Strange but true? Actually, no. These, like the 1,000 or so other myths currently circulating or rather steaming at breakneck speed around the internet, are complete rubbish.
To us Brits they are the cyber equivalent of the urban myth', or urban legend' to our US counterparts. And to many people particularly those who spread the rumours it's a laugh, because it's not as if people actually believe them, surely?
But that's where you'd be wrong, as the banana market in the US has found to its cost a staggering $30m to be precise. Thanks to a rumour about the "flesh-eating Klingerman virus" in bananas described by US scientists variously as "patently absurd" and "pseudo-scientific twaddle" last year shoppers boycotted the banana aisles by the container-load, and the industry made its way into the history books as the first case of internet sabotage to be quantified in financial terms.
The worrying fact for companies and brands is that consumers have a tendency to believe things they stumble upon on the net particularly if they're e-mail messages which have been forwarded on by well-meaning friends and colleagues. And for good reason, believes John Llewellyn, professor of communications at Wake Forest University in the US. He explains: "The exact capability to pin down the origin of the urban legend has never been defined they have a way of coming out of the mist.
"Many illustrate what people are worried about at a particular time.
"We live in a world where we don't understand how everything works or where everything comes from. We have an ambient level of trust, but at the back of our mind is a bit of worry. These sorts of stories are a useful reminder to be careful about what you eat."
And in the days of BSE and CJD, an environment of anxiety has been created that, in an information vacuum, can imbue even the most far-fetched rumours with an aura of credibility.
Folklore in its numerous manifestations from ghost stories to old wives' tales has played an important social function for centuries. Such tales originally took a few hundred years to bed down, but modern communications, especially e-mail, have now sped oral transmission of the fearful and the curious up to a matter of weeks or days. Cyberspace now re-energies the urban legend with the intensity and immediacy of a rumour. It's a powerful combination.
More often than not, it is plain bad luck if your product or company is used as a peg on which to hang this social function.
But that is not to say all internet rumours start from nowhere. Some can be traced back to disgruntled employees porous organisations in the e-world give companies little control over their information.
There are also instances of unscrupulous companies damaging the competition with whispers in the wind.
But Llewellyn believes deliberate internet hoaxes lack a compelling narrative and fail to provide the sort of story an average person wants to tell. "People have to enjoy telling these stories for them to have a life of their own," he says.
But for all the noise on the net, David Phillips, a consultant with Internet Reputations and author of Managing Cyber Relations, does not believe the world is an angrier place. "This is not people becoming more angry or vociferous. Their conversations are simply moving from thousands of pubs and bars around the world to the internet. On the net they take on a new life, with companies for the first time able to hear what is being said."
A recent study at Wake Forest puts the cost of the cyber rumour mill to US companies alone in excess of £300m. It's not just lost sales however, as the amount of staff involved and the breadth of the headache are significant.
But not every story is going to lose brand sales, believes Red Bull new media manager Anoushka Hartop. She claims the bulls' bullocks story which originated offline in the early 1990s in Austria and was given new life on the net was so in tune with the audience and the brand image it actually helped sales.
Even a more recent story claiming the energy drink contained a dangerous stimulant linked to the formation of brain tumours, bizarrely also had a positive impact on sales, Hartop claims. "Because we turned this around really quickly, everyone was talking about us," she explains.
The first Red Bull knew of the hoax was when a single e-mail arrived from a concerned consumer. Within five days the hoax had circulated worldwide and the company was receiving a query every two minutes.
The mail suggested that the ingredient Glucuronolactone a naturally occurring metabolite was an artificially manufactured stimulant developed in the early '60s by the US government and used in Vietnam to boost morale among GIs. The substance was banned, the story goes, following several deaths and hundreds of cases involving anything from severe migraines to brain tumours. The e-mail signed off: "Please pass this on to any Red Bull drinkers you know, and next time you get a headache after drinking the stuff, you'll know why!"
Hartop explains: "We did try to find out who started this, but that's almost impossible given that anyone can open a web based e-mail account using any identity they choose."
Instead the company concentrated on responding to each inquiry within two minutes. "There was a great temptation for us to mail every name on the circulation list on each e-mail, as well as the person that had contacted us. But we believed that would be a real invasion of privacy and could have created more negative backlash. Instead we asked those we did contact to forward our mail to concerned friends."
However it was the press coverage that really turned the crisis around. "They were really interested in the story as it highlighted a totally new phenomenon. In the end we made this into quite a positive issue and sales actually went up probably because everyone was talking about it," Hartop says.
Red Bull's informed, personal and light-handed response won applause from the growing number of internet reputation and marketing companies. However, it is not an approach much in evidence elsewhere.
The Wake Forest study contacted 24 multinationals which had been the subject of net rumours. Researchers were unimpressed with the response which they gave and similarly disappointed with web site content. If a response existed at all on a site, they were extremely well hidden, and legalistic in tone, often warning surfers against spreading disinformation. Many had no contact e-mail address or else mailboxes were full.
Llewellyn says: "These are the sorts of things organisations would never do in a phone call or letter. The tone and level of attention were all wrong. It's as though the web really isn't a communication tool and companies don't believe people take stock of what they see there."
Julia Woodham-Smith, senior analyst at internet agency Forrester Research, believes companies have yet to come to terms with the internet. "Things are said about companies all the time in the offline world and they can't do a thing about it so they've never worried. The fact they can now hear these things being said has come as a big shock to them and many are reacting totally over the top." Companies should resist the temptation to try and control what's being said and view it as a positive listening device in the market instead, she says.
Internet marketing consultancy Bluepool, which works for leading brands including Guinness, regularly eavesdrops on newsgroups and chatrooms favoured by key consumers to find out what they are thinking about the brand.
Director James Gunn says: "Obviously we can't monitor the whole internet, but we can identify where customers are online.
"We need to understand our audience and where a potential threat might come from by identifying the issues which may be of concern. From there we can build a communications campaign to ensure we've pre-empted any negative coverage."
It's not a position every brand favours. Cadbury's media relations manager Tony Billsborough believes the confectionary brand is safe from internet mischief. "Chocolate is a pretty friendly product and we don't monitor the net for this stuff. We rely on staff using the web as part of their daily routines and the media to bring anything to our attention," he says.
But it's not just negative brand stories doing the rounds. Equally pervasive are rumours creating fictional give-aways and special offers. One US baby food manufacturer was inundated with a million letters and 80,000 phone calls after an e-mail suggested it was giving $500 to every child born between 1985 and 1997 by way of a legal settlement concerning its labelling all entirely fictitious.
Walkers has faced a number of similar hoaxes suggesting that the company will pay for the overseas treatment of a seriously ill boy if he can collect his own weight in crisp packets. Wisewood School in Sheffield still has a note on the web asking students to help a mum's "friend's son who is seriously ill".
The plea reads: "Walkers Crisps have generously offered to pay for his treatment but only if we can collect his weight in empty Walkers crisps packets!! The boy weighs four stones a lot of packets!!! TOGETHER WE CAN DO IT!!! If we all keep our packets snip off the tokens for the library and give what's left to your form tutor we'll soon reach the target (and solve some of the litter problems in the school grounds)."
These mails do the rounds all the time: free flights, free computers, free mobile phones if you are thinking of calling the number for the free mobiles supposedly on offer at the moment, be warned that it is a sex line number.
But what if you are the company reportedly giving away the freebies and facing a barrage of disappointed consumers?
The fact that these people are contacting you in the first place suggests they are in your target market and the last thing you want to do is disillusion them. A routine rebuff is not going to create goodwill and Professor Llewellyn suggests a personal approach outlining the problem the company has faced.
It is never going to be possible to prevent falsehoods spreading on the internet but brands can, to some extent, control whether consumers believe them. David Phillips says the key is to listen and respond to your online audience before a problem arises. "It won't stop the rumours, but a thousand consumers will say I don't believe that of my Tesco'," he says.
"Individuals don't bring issues to a head, the people that listen to them do. Online rumour creators are the equivalent to raving drunks and the disaffected. If your audience is listening to that person and saying he has a point', you've got a real problem," he adds.
Few companies are there yet and in truth taking on the centuries old tradition of urban myths is a pretty tall task. What they should be capable of doing, however, is using their existing customer relationship skills combined with the technology of the internet to minimise the impact of cyber story telling.
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