Yahoo! How Social Media Took the Roar Out of Tiger Woods

Did you hear that Tiger Woods has a new nickname?  Lion Cheetah.

That joke is about one of about two dozen (more here ) that I've seen sent around the Web within the first week of the Tiger Woods accident at his home in Orlando . 

While everyone loves a good joke, especially at expense of a celebrity, it shows the rising power of how social media can bring a graveyard of skeletons out of a very small closet.

I resisted the temptation to jump on the bandwagon to write about the incident as it first happened, mainly for two reasons: the facts in the beginning of any big story tend not to be completely true, and I wanted to see how social media would play a role in it.

After just two weeks, it's clear that social media has roared its head and has yet to satisfy its appetite.

Personally, looking back at the accident information, it look more like Tiger's accident was a direct result of him drinking and probably taking the sleep-aid Ambien before pulling behind the driver's seat of his car.

While the National Enquirer had recently linked Tiger Woods to a New York cocktail waitress at the time of the accident, I'm not sure how directly those two things were tied together that night.

However, Tiger (or his people) made a decision that I believe sealed his fate and let the social media dogs have their day.

He stayed silent.

As a result, he allowed the social media world to do the talking for him and to his sponsors—some who are now former ones .

From golf blogger Brian Balligee, who struggled to release an article of his interview with Rachel Uchitel the day after the National Enquirer story, to the Huffington Post now posting Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter accounts of some of his alleged mistresses, to Saturday Night Live making fun of the accident , the viral nature of Tiger Woods scandal was like a leaf blower on a house of cards.

It's not pretty and, unfortunately, it's not over.

That's just fine to search engine Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, who told attendees of the recent UBS Global Media and Communications Conference that the Tiger Woods soap opera has meant great business for the search company. 

"God bless Tiger ," is her exact quote.

Since the scandal, Yahoo! search traffic got a huge uplift on their Front Page, News, Sports, and Gossip sections.  His situation was better than Michael Jackson dying.  She said, "It is kind of hard to put an ad next to a funeral."

As you can imagine, Tiger's situation is the perfect storm of what social media is good at: communication of relevant and valuable information to a network or networks in an accelerated time frame.  Yahoo! is, in a sense, an enabler for our insatiable need to know and they are more than willing to do it.

As a result, the sheer amount of information being shared on Tiger is overflowing and, rightfully or wrongfully so, his marriage is on the rocks, he's out of golf, his sponsors are dropping him, and we're left to wonder who he didn't have an affair with.

If the world's most identified, bankable, and likable athlete with a seemingly iron clad brand image can be taken down...any professional athlete can.

Eventually, Tiger Wood's scarlet letter will be crowned on the next unwilling recipient.

It's now just a question of who it will be.

And Yahoo! is only happy to be the one to tell you about it.