Bill Hilton (@billhiton) tried to wind Dan Howarth (@danhowarth) and me up last week by forwarding on a blog posting from Media Post about how PR people and professional Twitter users are killing the network with excessive noise.
It simply isn’t the case.
Twitter is a truly democratic network in which an individual must earn the respect of another user in order to engage in conversation and become a part of their network. Users that don’t follow these basic principles simply are ignored, aren’t followed or are blocked.
Loewy colleague Phil Whitehouse who works in the digital crew at The Team has created the Twitter Ten Commandments (@tencommandments) which develops these basic Twitter tenets.
Spam is spam, regardless of the channel. There will, unfortunately, always be shady practitioners who spam out messages with no regard for the recipients. The same best principles apply when using Twitter as apply when building out your media list, a topic that we covered a while back on our blog: http://inmedialog.com/index.php/archives/theres-no-shortcut-for-building-a-great-media-list/
God, I love fame – cheers for the credit, Wadds.Good points, and thanks for pointing me at Phil’s commandments. The only thing I’d disagree with is the view that Twitter is democratic. I see it it as more anarchic, or anarcho-syndicalist if you want to get geeky and have girls avoid you at parties.In a blatant attempt to steal your blog’s readers, I’ve written more about this here: http://is.gd/kyGs
Hehe: ‘knobwedge’I couldn’t agree more. Quite surprising that said post came from a site that styles itself as ‘a media professional’s leading resource’. Clearly all the author uses Twitter for is to see what flavour PopTart his xbox 360 buddy has had for breakfast, or to ROFLMFAO at the latest LOLcat… That’s certainly not what I use it for, and I’ve found a lot of value in meeting people, gaining insights and learning from them. Plus we get to be part of stuff as incredible as Twestival, and marvel at the antics of intrepid tweeps like @twitchikerYes there’s a lot of noise on Twitter, but only for the people who are listening. The spammers and gobshites are welcome to pollute their feeds with garbage – they can read my stuff if they want to, but I’m quite happy to engage in some good conversations.