What are you doing? What are you doing right now?

As a follow-up to my previous post regarding Twitter, Forrester Research’s Jeremiah Owyang blogs about a PR tempest in a teapot driven by a single ill-received Tweet.

It’s entertaining to watch how the PR industry self-spins, in this latest dust up regarding a tweet by James Andrews, an executive who works at Ketchum, a well known PR agency.

James is accused of bad form, and his company had to backtrack when he posted this tweet on the way to visit his client Fedex: “True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say “I would die if I h ad to live here!” it caused angst with the ‘location sensitive’ client, and they issued this comment, apparently on this blog (update: this may have been an email from Fedex to Ketchum), after it was run up the Fedex flagpole. (via David, and Peter)

One aspect of social networking that I find disheartening is the frequency with which people update their status messages or tweet in such a way as to make themselves seem petty. I don’t think that every personal update needs to be rainbows and unicorns, but I wonder sometimes if people were to simply look at a month’s worth of status updates and tweets, how well they would think that reflects the way they want the world to perceive them.

There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.

Most days my feelings regarding Twitter are mixed to negative. I see a lot of value in it for my clients and can certainly understand the fun individuals have with it. That said, the signal to noise ratio is much too high for my personal taste and I don’t know that people’s Twitter feeds always show them at their best.

Occasionally, though, Twitter yields something really compelling.