Tweet with care

Anthony Iori

AI296408@ohio.edu

As a professional journalist, advertising associate or public relations officer in today’s world it is important to adhere to the level of professionalism that the public has come to expect from us. I think the same level of care must cross over into the digital world, especially on Facebook and Twitter. I would argue that as men and women earning a living in the field of communication we forfeit our rights to be carefree and careless with our digital input. RTNDA makes several good arguments about what to put on Twitter and Facebook as people working in communication. As a journalist or PR professional it is expected to promote topics and dialogue that are important to the public. Posts about breakfast and the walk in the park do not appeal to the public and so we should keep them off of our pages. It also calls for accuracy; just because there is a limited space on Twitter does not imply that the posts should be made with haste and be full of errors. Our goal is accuracy in communications.

Once we have eliminated the unnecessary things from our Facebook statuses and Twitter handles, we can harness the power of sites such as these sites. Twitter and Facebook together have members that nearly double the population of the United States. If someone could reach one percent, or even half of one percent then he or she will have achieved massive success utilizing the new technologies of 21^st century communication. Many news organizations have discovered the potential, and as we learned in the readings over fifty outlets have hired social media editors to maximize content.

And finally, when we make a mistake in today’s social media environment, we must take to twitter to try to calm the potential onslaught of remarks or it could be these social networks that leave the journalist or the organization with a hefty PR nightmare. Amazon found out the hard way when it attempted to merely stay quiet on an issue involving potential gay and lesbian discrimination instead of attacking the situation through the traditional press in addition to Facebook and Twitter. The outrage could have been mitigated or even kept from happening if Amazon used these tools in a preemptive way instead of laying back and waiting to adapt as issues arise.