If you’ve been wondering about the real quantitative power of social media, this report from London may open your eyes – though it’s unlikely it will do your estimation of human nature a power of good.

It seems that the American Apparel brand of t-shirts and other trendywear is ‘the height of hipster.’ Being generally very expensive, it is eagerly sought when sales occur. Fine.

So when AA decided to stage a ‘rummage sale’, the company rented premises in Brick Lane London and heavily publicized the upcoming event on social networking site Facebook.

Lamentably, it forgot to check the response – which was overwhelming….

Ten police officers suffered injury (none serious) and three people were arrested on public order offences when scuffles broke out after (the first) 2,000 people descended on the Day 1 of the proposed 4-day American Apparel sale.

Reportedly shoppers went absolutely ‘ crazy’ as they fought, tussled and pummeled over the cut price items on sale.

But it could have been a lot worse – these were just the forerunners of the 30,000 people who had actually signed up on Facebook to attend the sale!

But of course, American Apparel didn’t know this: they’d forgotten to check. Consequently police had not been notified of the impending uprising – and they weren’t happy either.

In the event, American Apparel was forced to stop the sale, with fewer than thirty people actually making a purchase. However they re-opened the following day after making peace with police and hiring more - a lot more- security and queue-control staff.

The company’s brand manager Jan Hubner said: “Everyone is happy today. The problem yesterday was that the line wasn’t controlled from early in the morning.

‘At 10am there was a burst of people coming to the front door. We couldn’t control that. We knew it was going to be big but not this big. Today we started from 5am to make sure the line was under control. And we opened the doors at 8.30am although the official time was 10am. We’ve doubled the security and now have 30 people helping to control the lines.’

Who would have thought?
It looks like the moral for the moment is: never under-estimate the power of persuasion when you toot your flute on social media. And … always but always… monitor the response your postings are getting.