It is amazing what a YouTube video can do to smash a carefully rehearsed publicity stunt.

Vladamir Putin has been touring Russia in a yellow Lada. For four consecutive evenings in August, the main bulletins on state TV showed the Prime Minister driving along the highway and stopping off for stage-managed photo opportunities. He took tea with villagers, chatted with lorry drivers and construction workers and visited a hydro-electric power station and the proposed site for a space centre.

All the reports featured prominently the brightly coloured Lada, and the Prime Minister talking up its attributes. In Channel One’s Vremya bulletin on 29 August, he told construction workers that it “goes smoothly, holds the road beautifully and is not noisy”.

However, The Prime Minister probably didn’t notice the little knot of people from the appropriately named Diversant (Saboteur) off-road-vehicle club who had gathered along the side of the Chita-Khabarovsk highway in the hope of catching a glimpse of him behind the wheel. As he drove past, they had their cameras at the ready and what they filmed wasn’t quite the picture shown on television.

Instead of the mainly close-up shots of the Lada Kalina, giving the impression that Putin was virtually alone on the open road, the Diversant film shows Putin’s car dwarfed by an enormous motorcade, numbering, according to one eyewitness, over 100 police cars, black jeeps and back-up vehicles.

More damaging for the Russian car industry was the revelation that the motorcade contained two more yellow Lada Kalinas, one driving behind Putin and the other riding on the back of a transporter truck. The common assumption was that the spares were needed because the car was so unreliable.

In the video you can see the Diversant vehicle club celebrate when the second Lada drives past, and toward the end of the video when the third rolls past on a repair truck they are beside themselves with laughter.

This video has become a YouTube hit with the two most viewed copies having around 850,000 views, the videos have also been mentioned by bloggers within Russia and has been used for political ridicule within the region.

This has also led to a number of pertinent questions being asked about the quality of reporting within the country, why was this not reported by the large media entourage within the cavalcade of cars following the former president?

The interesting thing here is not the fact that almost a million people have seen the truth from his road trip across Russia. But rather that this has shown the power of social media.  If things are not what they seem and if someone finds out about it then they have the power to tell the world in real-time. 

This is something that politicians and companies will have to get used to because it is becoming increasingly the case that everyone is just one Google search away from the truth.