Twitter is not a popularity contest
Do people put enough thought into their tweets? Remember the old adage. Tweet in haste, repent at leisure.
Britain's Lewis Hamilton, the Grand Prix star who currently drives for Mclaren but is moving to Mercedes next year, made a Twitter gaffe to be proud of. Shortly after announcing his decision to switch teams he publically complained about his current team-mate, Jenson Button by tweeting: "Just noticed Jenson Button unfollowed. That's a shame. After 3 years as teammates, I thought we respected one another but clearly he doesn't."
Hamilton was later forced to make an equally public apology when it was pointed out to him that Button didn't unfollow him as an insult because Button had never been following him on Twitter in the first place. Quite why Hamilton felt the need to share this grievance with the planet is unclear, but it highlights how many people perceive Twitter as a mark of popularity. Follow people on Twitter if they have interesting things to say or are providing good information. Don't follow them out of a sense of duty or obligation.
Highly-paid sportsmen should surely spend some of that money on PR consultants before they go onto the internet. Footballer Ashley Cole who plays for Chelsea and England has been fined £90,000 by the Football Association for bringing the game into disrepute via a disparaging twitter comment he made about the FA. It wasn't that the tweet was grossly offensive, especially not compared to the language you hear on the terraces during match day, but it was the very public nature of it which caused the upset. Although it was quickly deleted when Cole realised he'd gone too far, the offending message had been retweeted 19,000 times.
This is just the latest in a series of Twitter gaffes by footballers and the FA has now released a social networking code of conduct which, amongst other things, bans players from using sites like Twitter for 24 hours before any game they play in. The code of conduct runs to six pages. Perhaps it would be more widely read if written in a series of messages each 140 characters or less.
Warrington Rugby League player, Paul Wood, suffered a bad injury in the sport's Grand Final in October but played on despite the pain. Afterwards, with as much dignity as he could muster, he tweeted: "Sat in hospital with ruptured testicle. Please don't laugh, very painful and embarrassing!" Too much information? Perhaps, but much better PR than many sports stars achieve.
Politicians also perceive Twitter as an important place to be seen, and think having a lot of followers is an important way of demonstrating how popular you must be, an appeal to the herd mentality. In June 2009, David Cameron appeared on Absolute Radio and explained why he wasn't on Twitter: "Politicians do have to think about what we say and the trouble with Twitter, the instantness of it, is that too many twits might make a twat". In October 2012, to coincide with the launch of the Conservative Party Conference, David Cameron joined Twitter.
Tweet of the month must surely go to that venerable institution, Oxford University, which on 18th October tweeted "Being brainy may not always be the best strategy, study of great tits shows".
25th October 2012
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.