February 16, 2010Caught red handed: how not to use Twitter

I’ve posted before about the perils of twitter. Twitter is a bubble used by a relatively small community of people — particularly, for some reason, politicians and web designers. But in small bubbles, news travels fast. And if you get it wrong, you get the entire self-righteous community coming down on you, as they did recently with Jan Moir and AA Gill or, more noble-mindedly, over the Trafigura case.

But it’s the fact that Twitter is so immediate that makes it so dangerous. It’s like having a gun with no safety catch. If you hold it in your hand, if you play with it, if, in short, you don’t know what you’re doing, sooner or later it’s bound to go off.

And that’s exactly what happened to Labour politician David Wright yesterday.

In a tweet, David Wright MP referred to opposition politicians as “scum sucking pigs” — hardly insult of the century, you might think, but in Britain the political system is still pretty formal, in fact you can’t even call an opposing MP a liar without the speaker of the house demanding an apology and a retraction. Protocol is a big thing in British politics, which comes as a great surprise to all of us, even in the UK, as the majority of the population probably do think that all politicians are scum sucking pigs, regardless of political persuasion.

So it didn’t take long for a storm to brew up in this particular MP’s teacup. But where he really damned himself was his defence. David Wright argued that someone had edited his tweets. As political blogger Guido Fawkes was quick to point out, you can’t edit a tweet once it’s been posted. David Wright was quickly caught out and accused by a much wider community of being a liar — with proof.

He’d compounded his initial mistake. He tweeted without thinking, then he paid a further price the next day by not understanding the technology he was using.

I’ve said before that Twitter is very much a double-edged sword. Used well, it can be an immensely powerful marketing tool. But used badly, it can be a PR disaster for you as an individual or as a company. Even when you think you’re using it ‘correctly’ it’s too easy to be seen as spamming twitter with your marketing if you don’t contribute to the community. There’s nothing worse than someone constantly talking about themselves, constantly trying to push their services, trying to make you pay attention to them — so whenever you’re tweeting, you really do need to give extra special thought to what you say.

I’m still not on Twitter, because I haven’t found the time for it. Between Facebook for status updates, RSS for news and Tumblr for fun, I haven’t found a reason to tweet. The designer of this site wants to add a ‘re-tweet this blog’ button to make it easier for a wider audience to read, digest, and disagree with my ramblings. I’m tempted to say yes. But other than that, how do you think I should be using Twitter?

Apart from occasionally updating you on my latest blog posts and perhaps sharing links from other sites I find interesting (which I already do on Tumblr), what would you want me to tweet about? The fact that I haven’t been able to answer that question satisfactorily is what keeps me from using it at the moment.

Unlike David Wright MP, I like to think before I open my mouth. And right now, I think I’d just be spamming you with links about me and my business, and in the long run I think that would do me more harm than good.

So come on, folks. I’m asking for your advice. Would you want me to tweet, and if so, what would you want to read about? I’m open to suggestions.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Blog, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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