In the Twitter World, It’s all About the Credit

Professional bloggers, newscasters, authors, politicians and students find themselves in this vacuum of a race to find information. The one that “tweets it out” gets the street credit for finding that information. This creditability is desired to either look important or smart, or to look “cool” and “savvy.” This is not a situation limited to only younger twitter users. Even those in professional fields sometimes find Twitter being just as competitive as their professional expertise. The race for say sales and ratings then manifests itself in the race for tweets and followers.

In the Twitter world, much creditability is given to the person that finds something interesting online, and becomes the first one to tweet it out. The “retweet” function then only advances this desire for attention. Being “retweeted” shows that not only is this person following you, but is a vote of approval that they liked what you posted. Those person’s followers then get to see that you are the “smart” or “cool” or “savvy” person that found that information. It sometimes can grow into a rivalry that boarders on immature, but yet even the most professional bloggers and tweeters use the same tactics.

I have seen two elected officials tweet and @reply each other in a hostile tone, I have seen people call others out for tweeting something first, and I have had two personal examples of friends (and fellow Tweeters) who have competed with me for Tweet credit.

Not only is something interesting found online limited to a video, or a blog post, or a good article. The race extends to those who can come up with something funny, or captures something with camera phone and then posts the picture on their Twitter. Maybe to embarrass someone else, or just for a laugh, but the race to be the first one to coin the joke, or post the picture is as intense as the more material Tweets.

I notice it even with stupid examples. A friend of mine and I were walking through campus when we noticed a typo on a sign. As I pulled out my phone to take a picture, he started to get mad thinking I was going to upload the picture to Twitter, and thus take credit for seeing the sign and I guess somehow get the “laugh credit.” Really he saw the sign first, so he thought he was entitled to have the option of posting it first if he chose too. You can see how idiotic sometimes this becomes. But he was so angry that I tried to take the picture that he blocked my shot and then took out his iPhone to take the picture. The photo generated numerous views and @replies so he was satisfied with his credit.

In another example, another friend coined a certain phrase in one my tweets. It was a hashtag, and he insisted that I say in my tweet that he was the one to come up with it. If was very funny and we could tell that it was going to stick as a joke, so he insisted that even though I was the only one with my phone, that he be mentioned for the credit.

These behaviors are very annoying, but since much of the Twitter action I follow is professional, I can understand the natural desire to have due credit. The other examples show how stupid and trivial things can become.

Brush up on your Twittequette before you become a serious user.

Obama and Twitter

Sometimes I get annoyed at stupid things. Things that at one time or another seem like a big deal, and then become not important at all when you look back at them. I feel like this post will fall into that category when I look back at it in the future, but here and now it’s annoying me.

For some reason I was annoyed by President Obama last week saying that he never used Twitter. Now, I am not naive enough to think that he actually maintained his own Twitter throughout the course of the election, but his entire campaign prided itself on this new era and new modes of campaigning. They used the internet to raise money, organize volunteers, and advance his cause, name and agenda better then any campaign ever seen. While I’m not mad that he didn’t necessarily use the account, I am shocked that in the same statement, he seemed to have only minimal knowledge of the tools used to help get him elected. Base on his answers to the questions, I came away with the impression that he only had a conversational knowledge of what mechanisms helped get him into the White House.

"Let me say that I have never used Twitter," Obama said in response to a question from a Chinese student about using Twitter freely in China. Obama continued: "I noticed that young people - they're very busy with all these electronics. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone."The other account is @WhiteHouse, which was first set up to send out news about H1N1. @BarackObama has close to 2.7 million followers and @WhiteHouse has over 1.4 million followers. MG Siegler of TechCrunch, a non-partisan blog that reports on social media, wrote today, "Obviously, he had a killer team around him that was able to embrace the web...Still, it's somewhat surprising that he never sent any of his own tweets during the primaries."

While all of this is interesting, I think the larger issue here is who is allowed to run these accounts. The people that run these accounts have very powerful tool at their disposal: The namesake of the President of the United States. The people who run these accounts could advance anything they wanted to the millions of people that follow him on the various accounts. I wonder what the back-scenes workings are for his tweets. Is it one staff person who writes them? It is a team? Is it some intern who has the access to inform millions of people something? Who knows the passwords to the accounts? Etc.

As a citizen, it makes me uncomfortable to think that the mantle of the President could be used by a staff member. I understand maybe signing his name on a letter, or releasing a statement on his behalf, but both of those examples are forms of communication that have been vetted for decades. What are the modern media rules that the White House uses? Also all citizens should be concerned that it may take a mistake (of varying size)to prompt of series of rules to be put into place.