Fritter Ye Not
Twitter is certainly managing to stay in the media spotlight and its usage and awareness is growing all the time.
And, of course, as use grows, so does abuse. So following on from Astroturfing, which is the creation of fake grass roots support, we now have the practice of "frittering" - creating a fraudulent Twitter account.
Writing in PR Week, Richard Stokoe, head of news at the Local Government Association explained how a Twitter account had been created in the name of that organisation's CEO. The account carried the CEO's picture, was being regularly updated with snippets of news, and had attracted some 500 followers. Except it is not being written by the CEO, any of his staff, or indeed any of the comms team of the organisation. Which creates something of a problem.
At the time of writing, Twitter had not responded by taking down the site and the anonymous poster was still busy creating followers and building a false profile of the organisation.
Reputationally, this has serious implications. Twitter always presented the opportunity for this sort of thing, and probably needs to work on its verification system, but this development should be raising red flags within the organisation and requires urgent action.
In its early days Twitter attracted a number of people pretending to be celebrities - sometimes openly and usually with the objective of merely having some fun.
Jonathan Ross, a well-known and genuine user of Twitter, set himself up as the No 1 Twitter detective. He checked out celebrity listings and revealed to his followers whether they were fake or genuine.
But while most of these false celebrity postings could be classified under "harmless fun", passing yourself off as representing the thoughts of a company - maybe even a listed company - certainly takes us into new territory. Possibly even actionable territory.
Twitter has already reached "bandwagon" status, and looks set to continue growing exponentially. But if the owners want to look after their own reputation, and protect whatever the planned revenue model is, then they need to act swiftly to prevent the wheels from coming off.
Written by Kevin Taylor, CCgroup, first blogged on www.thinkabouttech.com 10th March 2009, under his alias Telecomtails