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.
Great post! I like to say that with social media, what you say is public and permanent. It’s a lot easier to make a snide remark at a party and get away with it. No one is carrying around a recorder (well, maybe a flip camcorder) to capture every word. Not so with the online world. It pays to self-manage and conduct yourself with integrity.