Noun. The act of using Twitter to lessen/destroy a company’s reputation

It is perplexing to why Twitter has gained so much popularity during this year when the social networking organism formed during 2006. The majority, if not all, of the available PR blogs have at least one article on Twitter. This blog is an ode to this but it is also true that most blogs have far too many articles concerning Twitter and its functions – this is the tightrope this blog treads.

I cannot lie. I have done work and indeed still doing work for clients where Twitter has become an important part of the promotion mix. With ePR being such an up-to-date method of raising a company’s image Twitter could be seen as a God send for those of us who understand the effectiveness of the network. Anybody who signs up to Twitter could be regarded as lambs to the slaughter as PR Professionals use every tactic necessary to hunt down users who fulfil the interests of the clients they are working on behalf of. Even I, a student, have had suspiciously relevant Twitter accounts add me concerning club nights and student promotions.

Like with any system though, Twitter is not without its downfalls. The perfection of Twitter as a network works as a positive in both directions of the two-way communication model. Twitter works using the method of asymmetrical communication, a mutual communication balance does not exist like it does with alternative social networks. If I were to become friends with a person on Facebook then they have to accept me back. The same applies with Bebo and Myspace. It is possible to place individual privacy settings around individual users but the communication is still balanced. Friends exist within a symmetrical communication line. However, Twitter allows you to be ‘friends’, a follower but the person you are following does not need to follow back. The communication line is unbalanced. I believe it is this basic feature of Twitter which has driven to its unarguably large success.

A student promotional company might be following my updates but I can choose to not follow theirs back. If I don’t follow their updates then the company is unable to reach me with the latest news from the company and so rendering my small existence a lost number in their online promotional mix. This highlights the current problem with ePR, tactics are limited to the construction of the network you operate within. How can there ever truly be originality on the World Wide Web with these constructional limitations?

Not only is the basic construction of Twitter interesting but so is the way it handles privacy and systematic function. It is very easy to misuse Twitter for your own advantage to gain followers or to declare your messages. A recent example of this was when @HabitatUK, the furniture chain, decided that they would supply their messages with hashtags to increase the circulation of their messages. A series of unspoken laws exist on Twitter which are usually decided by the users (although Twitter do reinforce some). To trick the Twitter search system to believe you message are trending topic would always generate unpopularity and Habitat UK suffered Twittercide as a result. A public apology has now been released but stating that “hashtags were pasted into messages” without checks. Who knows what Habitat were thinking. They have admitted that an agency wasn’t used.

Of course, there are many ways in which you could upset users on Twitter. One of the largest, wholly unspoken of evils, is the horror of automatic Direct Messaging (DM). Currently I have just over 1000 followers on Twitter and my DM box has 280 messages, all spam. If I follow somebody I don’t want an automatic message about how I should visit their website, buy their products or spark a conversation with them. Just leave my DM box alone! Send me spam and I will be far more likely to un-follow you. With how the DM system is being used Twitter could very well regard it as a superfluous feature and remove it with little fuss and huge praise. Although this might just be my belligerent view.

No related posts.