Manners in Twitterland

In which Jill looks in vain for the “undo” key.

photo by Robert Scoble

When it comes to Twitter, I embrace my friend Donald Farmer’s (@donalddotfarmer) metaphor that Twitter is a lot like a fish tank. You stop by and watch some interesting fish float past. It’s a temporal experience that yields interesting observations, exotic surprises, as well as some completely unremarkable specimens.

I’ve been a Twitter user for over six months and have established habits. I check out new followers and follow most everyone back. The exception is those with more than ten tweets in succession about getting more Twitter followers. I’ve also been known to count the number of “Good morning!”or “’Night, all!” tweets and make my follow decisions accordingly. I make it a point to re-tweet interesting, informative, and hilarious tweets, yet generally avoid re-tweeting Twitter heavy-hitters like Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) or Laura Fitton (@pistachio). Both are great to follow but people re-tweet them enough and this strikes me subtly cloying. Not so subtle are the “Read my blog!” DMs arriving daily from the legions of social media experts. 

 I follow smart professional friends like Ray Wang (@rwang0) of Forrester, Josh Weinberger (@kitson) from CRM Magazine, Scott Humphrey (@scotthumphrey) from Humphrey Strategic Communications, and strategy and leadership guru Art Petty (@artpetty), and I monitor tweets from my own firm, Baseline Consulting (@BaselineConsult). I don’t deploy bots that automatically thank people for following me, and I only recently began using the groups feature in Tweetdeck to organize my tweeple. (The Twitter lexicon just creeps up on you.)  I make it a point to log on to Twitter daily to stay in touch, but sometimes don’t tweet as often due to my hectic travel schedule. As my buddy Michael Cristia (@mcristia) once tweeted, “Jill, no tweets for three days! Traveling internationally?”

But despite my Twitter routine, I’m still very much of a dilettante. One follower I’ll call Pam had over 37000 of her own followers, making her a charter member of what I call the “tweet elite.” Pam’s profile described her as a social media-savvy professional woman, and her tweets were generally informative and smart. I followed her back. But I noticed a certain political theme recurring in her tweets that was squarely partisan (no problem), slightly mean-spirited (hmmm), and often hostile to those that disagreed (deal breaker). I’m all for healthy repartee, but in Pam’s case I could have logged off Twitter and turned on The O’Reilly Factor. I’d heard the term “unfollow” and decided to do it to Pam. 

So I typed “Unfollow @Pam.”  Less than 30 seconds later, I received a DM from Pam:

“If you are on a campaign to have people unfollow me on Twitter, then allow me to do the same for you.”

Uh oh.

Here was a hard-won lesson in Twitter diplomacy.” Crestfallen, I’d once used the “block” command on Anderson Cooper (@andersoncooper) because I was convinced his tweets weren’t his, but I’d never explicitly unfollowed anyone and figured it was just an in-line command. It wasn’t. And now Pam and her hearty army of loyalists were going to unfollow—or more likely block—me en masse and I was not only going to lose Twitter followers but some personal friends who weren’t even on-line, six degrees of separation being what it is.

“Yeah, I saw your tweet,” said my friend and our VP of Marketing, Tamara Dull (@tamaradull) when I shared Pam’s icy reply. “She’s a Twitter bigwig. I’m surprised it took her a full thirty seconds to see it.” Tamara coached me on how to go to a Twitter user’s profile and then click the “Remove” button there. “Then you might want to go back and delete the tweet,” she suggested, “and maybe remove it from your Facebook page, too.”  Tamara’s too nice to finger-wag in these situations but she could have, and I would have taken it, head bowed.

The obvious moral of the story is to learn to at least dog paddle before swimming with the big fish. But at the end of the day, the real lesson is that social media is new water altogether, and sometimes you have to just hold your breath and jump in.

Comments

[Terri Rylander]

It amuses me how much you can learn about a person in 140 characters. Pam's comment (threat) is telling.

So you didn't "unfollow" in the most appropriate way--she showed her true self with her reply!