Be Careful What You Tweet; You Don’t Know Who Is Watching

Today at work I had an embarrassing moment. I intern for Congressman John Boehner and I attended his press conference today on current events. During his remarks he made a very funny comment about the current healthcare plan that the democrats are proposing. The plan is likely (or really unlikely) to include a government option for health insurance, called a public option. Boehner was asked today for his thoughts on the public option and he remarked that he thought the public option was “about as unpopular as a garlic milk shake.”

I thought this was a very funny quote, and in the twitter world the first one to tweet gets the street cred. So I tweeted it out, along with a picture I took of him at the microphone. The picture got about sixty views. When I returned to my office from the press conference I was given an assignment to run something upstairs to one of Mr. Boehner’s leadership offices. (Boehner is the republican leader in the house). When I walked into the office upstairs I find the man I was looking for and he says to me “so you were talking some pictures at the press conference?”

I was so nervous that I was violating some kind of rule and that he saw me taking the pictures, but actually he had my twitter page up on his screen and a picture of me was staring back at me. For a second I worried about my previous tweets. Did I say anything embarrassing? Something I wasn’t supposed to repeat? Something that may make my boss look bad? I was nervous where he was going with this. He finally said that he was following me and that he and I should talk more about media and how I can help the Congressman. I breathed a sigh of relief and talked about new media with him for a few more minutes.

It just goes to show you that invisible audiences most definitely exist. People have the ability to search you or the search the topic you are writing about, and even with levels of protection people who are your “friends” or “followers” can still copy/paste what you say, or have five people staring at the screen behind them.

If I said something off-color, I very well may have cost myself my job today. Instead I might have opened a new opportunity.