I enjoy joke Twitter accounts as much as the next person. However, if you’re going to do one, you must be extra careful in keeping the account separate from your main account, which is why I also feel compelled to share the occasional cautionary tale.
Here’s one from today, noticed first by a colleague and concerning the Twitter account @speakerpelosi. Check out these two screen shots:
Whoops! The two posts went up within minutes of each other, which you can’t tell on account of Twitter’s imprecise time stamping (instead it just says both went up 2 hours ago). The tweet is still available on David All’s account, but is now gone from the fake Pelosi account. I suppose that’s about all the proof we need.
Is this just a cheap gotcha? If you think he’s done anything wrong, then perhaps so. I’ve been following the Twitter debate over this, and I think it’s been overdone: I don’t see how it is a TOS violation, and calling it sock puppetry is defining socks down.
I think the only thing necessarily wrong here is carelessness. Fake websites and joke accounts are fun, but they require a degree of caution that not everyone is up for.
If there is one other thing that’s wrong here, it’s the violation of Egon Spengler’s good advice: don’t cross the streams.
Update: It appears that David is now turning into the skid — probably a better way to handle it.
There was quite a bit of discussion about fake avatars, non-disclosing avatars, sock puppets etc on Sphinn.com recently. It was interesting to see what a wide range of opinions marketers had about the subject. Clearly no social norm has been established yet. There were good arguments on both sides (including some good examples from the Obama campaign) … but that was before Sphinn decided to eat itself and implode from the sheer mass of its own ridiculousness. Too bad.
Great update
Haha, what’s with all the Egon Spengler references lately? I made one the other day in a blog post I wrote (”Print is dead.”)
I think that’s the first Ghostbusters reference on this blog, although my Wikipedia account contains a similar deployment of the line. Yes, I confess to cribbing from myself.
You mean I am NOT the real Speaker Pelosi but now have her URL /speakerpelosi?
Heh.