PR-Squared’s Todd Defren wrote recently, while referring to a post on clients seeking coverage in an agency pro’s blog,

“As I write this, though, I find it interesting that the FORMAT/LENGTH of the write-up is where the line is getting drawn, i.e., a long-form blog post feels almost sacrosanct, whereas the stream-of-conciousness of Twitter is really not nearly so â??pureâ? to me.  Perhaps it is because I can so quickly bury a client-related tweet with, say, a lunchtime insta-poll about bacon.”

So, does format/ length really matter?

Let me present the real-life equivalent of something that happened recently in Mumbai. Shiv Sena and MNS were against Shah Rukh Khan’s film, My Name Is Khan and there was considerable buzz about how Shiv Sena and MNS have lost the plot, how Balasaheb has ‘lost it’ etc. How would it ideally look like in the real world? Assuming you tweeted twice, would it look like you putting up a small board outside your house with the content of the tweet?

Perhaps.

But what is more pertinent here is the duration that board was in existence/ visible. A tweet usually gets buried, but is still available to someone who follows like you’re the only religion left. Let me not get into a discussion of Dunbar Numbers, but in short, a tweet is a thought blurb shared with the world (your world) that you assume has a rather short life span.

So, the same people who would be worried and scared to put up a board outside their home criticizing a rabid political party, happily go on criticizing it on Twitter? In the real world, the specific worry is getting seen by the political party and its repercussions. On Twitter…nothing? Unless of course those political parties have a social media consultant who is monitoring their keywords in real time – just a matter of time, I presume!

With geo-tagging/ geo-location (Buzz?), this becomes even more real, since the said party – if it is hell bent – can locate where you posted that incriminatory (to it…not the world at large) tweet from and come after you depending on how grave your tweet was.

Other forms of online content – blog post, Facebook status update, a post in a discussion forum or even a blog comment comparatively stay much, much longer and Google helps in digging them up efficiently. A tweet almost vanishes into thin air after a week or so and even the Twitter search cannot dig it for you, unless someone got down to tracking and storing tweets based on some critieria.

1424635928_38145ce763Is this vaporous nature the reason behind people going haywire with their opinions on Twitter? Take the Cafe Coffee Day protest – there were about 3/4 blog posts on the topic, that too, a day later. But tweets? Oh, there were about 700+, right from the time that manager threw the hapless tweeters out, till a day or two after the event.

Twitter is no doubt making us significantly more impulsive in voicing our opinions, but for someone/ some organizations that is religiously tracking tweets as part of a larger social media monitoring exercise, no relevant tweet goes unnoticed.

So, think beyond your immediate community and set of followers before you tweet. An opinion is an opinion and in the online world, it has a far higher chance of being seen/ heard than it is in real life. People seem to think it is the other way round – you’d be amazed at the number of people I’ve met who think it is perfectly easy to post something anonymously (presumably) and assume that nobody will find out or make the connection!

Picture courtesy: floydgal via Flickr

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