Want the latest news? Just tweet.

A while ago I wrote a blog post about the effect Twitter has had on news reporting. In this blog I said that Twitter had increased the speed of information transfer so much that online news services that were once seen as the speedier upgrades to newspaper reporting had now become the slower alternative to Twitter.

Yesterday, the day that England football team manager Fabio Capello named his squad of 23 players, summed up my sentiments perfectly.

Capello was due to tell seven players who had been training with the provisional, 30-man squad that they would no longer be needed. All the news agencies and broadcasting companies were expecting a low-key FA statement, probably on their website, that would list exactly who would be on the plane. It was predicted to be a very stark contrast to the all-singing, all-dancing, overblown news conference that previous manager Sven Goran Eriksson delivered for the World Cup in Germany, four years previously.

What we got was neither, really.

Instead, we were drip-fed player names from journalists, player agents and their clubs telling us whether their players had made the cut or not. And Twitter was the primary means of communication.

Matt Law of the Daily Express was one of the first to break the news of Theo Walcott’s shock omission. “Walcott out of England World Cup squad,” he tweeted. “Gutted for him.”

Then Neil Ashton of the News Of The World told us that Michael Carrick, Shaun Wright-Phillips and Jermaine Defoe had made the cut. “Relief for Carrick, he’s in the England squad,” he tweeted. “Shaun Wright-Phillips in squad, Defoe in too.”

In the Sky Sports News TV studio, it seemed as if the reporters had given up trying to contact the FA for the latest news, or, at the very least, continuously hitting the F5 button on the FA homepage. Instead, it seemed as if they were now using their Twitter network to find out from players or people close to the players whether they were going or not.

It wasn’t until 4pm that we were all finally put out of our misery and an official announcement was made. But by this time we pretty much knew all seven names of those who wouldn’t be on the plane to South Africa - it was old news.

The FA certainly didn’t do themselves any favours by acting so slowly and perhaps it was naïve of them to assume that they could be so unprepared and get away with it. The longer they delayed the official announcement, the greater the chance that leaks would surface.

The fact is that online communications platforms like Twitter have completely changed the landscape of mass communication. Like it or not, any unofficial, transient word spoken intended to be disclosed information can be made public knowledge within a matter of seconds, with just one tweet. In this digital age, large organisations with public relations at the top of their agenda need to ensure they can adapt - and fast. And making sure they understand the way that digital communications platforms like Twitter work is fundamental to their success in doing so.