Twitter backfire
I’m not a big Twitter user nor do I follow a lot of people. However I’m noticing that those who are out there Twittering like crazy might want to rethink things a bit. Just as Googling a person became a requirement for HR people vetting resumes a few years ago, following a prospect on Twitter is surely the next reference source.
There’s a lot of Twittering going on- as I mentioned recently we collected over 45 million Tweets in the last few months and those were only Tweets with keyword phrases our SM2 users were searching on. I think that having a record of constant and often mindless Twittering could be something that could come back to haunt one in the future.
The important consideration are frequency (if he has time to do this all day, is he unemployed or wasting his employer’s time?) and subject matter (if he is doing this all day is he actually doing something productive or simply killing time?). Either negative would be a red flag for me if I was considering a candidate.
Before we had monitoring and search tools tools like our SM2 and Twitter’s own Summize, you could Tweet along all day without considering these real world consequences. Now, as micro-blogs start to have real world impact and attract analytical scrutiny, we need to consider the long term affects of telling the world that it’s Tuesday afternoon and you’re throwing them back in the neighborhood watering hole…
Social media is a public conversation that is being recorded. More on that in my next post…
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