What would happen if your Governor — not the press secretary but the Governor — suddenly blocked specific journalists from attending press conferences?

In a perfect world, newspaper editors and TV station news managers would tell the Governor that he didn’t get to decide who reports on the business of the state.

Down in Texas, we have a one-step-removed situation that illustrates one challenge of our 24x7, always on, 21st century life: negotiating the dividing line between public and private life, especially when you are an elected official.

On Monday, Dallas Morning News reporter @TomBenning told the world, on a DallasNews.com blog, that when he tried to follow @GovernorPerry, he encountered this message:

Could not follow user: You have been blocked from following this account at the request of the user.

If you think of public tweets as being, well, official statements from the Governor, then you are probably aghast that Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) [@GovernorPerry] is blocking journalists to keep them from following his tweets on his “personal” Twitter account. The one with more than 37,000 followers that he opened on January 01, 2009. The official account (@TexGov, opened on January 21, 2009) has less than 6,000 followers and is a push account for the press office, based on its level (or lack thereof) of interactivity.

@Replies For @GovernorPerry

Set aside for the moment the futility of blocking access to a public account.

Rick Perry lives in the public light. His account is officially “personal” but in actuality it is anything but personal: his @ replies account for less than 4 percent of his total tweetstream; an “@ reply” is direct conversational interaction with another Twitter account. In other words, Perry uses @GovernorPerry as a megaphone, not a telephone.

Tweet Stats For @GovernorPerry, Feb 2011

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that Twitter can be an effective tool, whether it’s being used to develop relationships and cultivate conversation or whether it’s being used as a broadcast tool. But I don’t characterize “broadcast” as “personal.”

Moreover, in recent months, Perry tweets on average less than once a day. His peak usage was March 2009, when he averaged four tweets/day. So it’s not like he’s saying much with his megaphone.

Clearly, Governor Perry’s press secretary thought about these issues before answering Benning’s email inquiry (emphasis added):

Yes, it is the governor’s personal account, so he manages it as he likes. He uses non-state resources.

Interface Used To Tweet By @GovernorPerry

If Governor Perry used state resources, his legal position would be clear: no blockage of journalists allowed.

What’s not clear is the accuracy of that statement, given that TweetStats shows that most of the tweets from @GovernorPerry are not made on a Blackberry (possibly a personal device) but are made from Twitter’s web interface. Web interface means computer, not a mobile browser.

Moreover, an analysis of a random selection of tweets from 2011 shows that several were made during normal business hours and days. Does the Governor really have two computers at his desk? Or regularly work from home?

Regardless, Perry’s account blocking is little more than a speedbump.

Regardless, Perry’s account blocking is more more than a speedbump.

Any reporter (or progressive blocker) who wants to know what Perry is saying on his public “personal” account can do so by subscribing to the RSS feed of the account.

And should you not use an RSS reader regularly, Benning reports that TCU journalism instructor Andrew Chavez (@adchavez) created a Google Docs application (bit.ly/guvtweets) to have those tweets delivered via email.

Finally, this is not the first time that Perry has prevented those who write about him from actively following his account. Last year, the Statesman reported that Katherine Haenschen, who writes for Burnt Orange Report, keeps a Twitter list of Texans blocked by @GovernorPerry.

Your feelings on the candidate Perry’s blockage of “progressive bloggers” may be less cut-and-dried, but the question raised then is the same as today: what is the line between “public” and “private” life for an elected public official in an always on world.

:: Follow me on Twitter!

Tools Used In This Story

• TweetStats
• TwitterGrader
• Storify

The California gubernatorial race took a humorous turn on Monday when a retweet was a missing letter from the URL it was promoting.

Sarah Pompei, a Meg Whitman spokeswoman, had intended to retweet a post from Whitman adviser Mike Murphy. Murphy’s tweet proclaimed:

Murphy Tweet Includes Link To Endorsement

But when Pompei copied and pasted the tweet, so that she could add an editorial tidbit, she left out the last letter in the bit.ly URL:

Pompei’s Tweet Includes An Errant Link

To her credit, Pompei hasn’t (yet) deleted the tweet, which had been retweeted 82 times as of this writing. But instead of linking to the press release where Whitman announces the endorsement of the Deputy Sheriff’s Association of San Diego County, the tweet linked to a June 2009 YouTube clip of what appears to be an amazing bass player. (Calling someone who speaks Japanese who can tell us something about the song!) Of course, the press release might get even more attention with this faux pas.

I have to take issue with the LA Times blog headline: this does not “underscore the dangers of tweeting”! The error could have happened with a copy-and-paste for an email.

TIP: LA Times PolitiCal blog and @tkallinen.

On September 11, the Washington Post claimed that Rev. Terry Jones kicked off the campaign for his International Burn A Koran Day on July 12 on Twitter. When I began researching the claims in the article, I found errors and holes, as this post documents. The post was developed on Storify, a platform that extends the concept of Posterous, making it very easy to pull snippets of information from the web and pull them into (one hopes) a coherent whole.

USA Today features Chicago restaurant Wow Bao (@BaoMouth), “an upscale fast food place,” as an example of how food service is using Twitter to respond to digital word-of-mouth.

Geoff Alexander, managing partner of Wow Bao, explained his company’s Twitter commitment like this: If somebody has 1,000 followers and writes a negative Tweet about Wow Bao, then 1,000 people could think the restaurant is bad. But if Wow Bao publicly responds to that Tweet, 1,000 people may see the issue is being handled.

The article also notes that Graham Elliot (@GrahamElliot), owner of Chicago’s Graham Elliot Restaurant and judge on Fox’s reality TV show MasterChef, writes his own tweets because he “wants his Twitter voice to be in line with the brand.”

“It’s great to have this wall torn down,” Elliot said. “Most of the time, people just want to be heard.”

Stats: @GrahamElliot

• 1,557 Tweets
• 5,716 Followers
• 516 Lists
• Following 0
• @ replies: 30.89%
• RT: 5.14%

Stats: @BaoMouth

• 8,658 Tweets
• 1,729 Followers
• 253 Lists
• Following 991
• @ replies: 21.34%
• RT: 60.41%

Twitter is officially promoting new stories of how people and brands are using the service. Check out Twitter is about … Community.

SOAR’s 6th Annual Putting the Pieces Together: Building Effective Partnerships for Children, Youth & Families professional development and networking conference is June 25 at South Seattle Community College.

I am on a morning panel:
Leveraging Collaborative Technology to Better Serve Children & Youth

During this session, panelists will discuss practical tools and strategies for using social networking and collaborative technologies.  Panelists will share examples of innovative uses of social media for online collaboration and then break into small discussion groups based on topics of interest to participants. Whether you are considering beginning to use more collaborative technology in your work or if you have many experiences, this session will share new ideas, resources, and networking opportunities.

Presented by: Rachel Scott (SOAR and the King County Youth Development Network), Joel Ballezza (Foundation for Early Learning), Roni Ayalla (Puget SoundOff), Kathy Gill (Master of Communication in Digital Media, UW)

If there is time for formal presentation, I have slides (ppt).

There are several good analyses of the BP “brandjacking” that folks have kindly pointed me to subsequent to this post going live. Here are a few:

• 22 May — John Taylor: BP Gets Brandjacked on Twitter
• 24 May — Oliver Blanchard: Living in the past = working in the past: How not to get brandjacked like BP Global PR
• 24 May — AdAge: Why BP Isn’t Fretting Over Its Twitter Imposter

And here is a visual comparison of @BPGlobalPR, @BP_America and @oil_spill_2010, from TwitterCounter:

Comparison Of @BPGlobalPR, @BP_America, @oil_spill_2010 Using Twitter Counter

The advice is so old that it is trite: to conduct an effective crisis communications campaign, communicators have to be present and conversant in the channels/communities/media where they need to talk to people before disaster hits.

And a second piece of advice is also so tired that it seems trite: secure your company’s brand name whenever there’s a new technology. With web sites, I was advising folks in the mid-90s to secure the .com, .org and .net associated with their names … as well as logical “spoof” names. And that was when it cost bucks to secure names!

But it seems no one at BP had taken either adage to heart before last month’s explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.

@BPGlobalPR, A Spoof Twitter Account

In researching Business Week’s top 100 brands, I learned last year that BP had lost @bp, legitimately, to Brian Pendelton. The company has owned @BP_America since 12 August 2008, but didn’t really use the account until this month. This week someone began making hay with @BPGlobalPR (established 19 May 2010). In fact, although the account is less than a week old, it has three times as many followers as @BP_America.

@BP_America : BP America
Until the explosion in the Gulf of Mexico last month, @BP_America averaged about three tweets per month. That’s not quite one a week. The tweets were all one-way, perfunctory, allowing someone in corporate communications to be able to say: “we’re on Twitter.” This month, in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico disaster, @BP_America is averaging about nine tweets per day.

TweetStats for @BP_America

Although BP has been trying to “talk” with people Twitter for more than a year, has anyone been listening? Prior to the 20 March 2010 explosion, the answer was “not too many” which isn’t surprising given how little BP was using the service. However, data from TwitterCounter shows a marked rise in followers since 5 May (2,306), when it began tracking the account. As of this writing, there are 4,623 followers, and the account is on 313 lists.

@BP_America Twitter Followers

The tweets are overwhelmingly one-way announcements with only a few @replies (less than 1% of the total, that is, only two). Perhaps not surprisingly, the account retweets @oil_spill_2010 (what’s with the underscores?).

@oil_spill_2010 : DeepwaterHorizon JIC

TweetStats For @Oil_Spill_2010

The account bio reads: “Updates from the Deepwater Horizon Incident Joint Information Center (JIC) on Unified Command response efforts to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.” It links to the “response” website and was created on 29 April 2010. As of this writing there are 5,421 followers, and the account is on 375 lists. There have been 680 tweets, an average of 25 per day, almost three times as many as the @BP_America account.

So there are more people following this account and it’s more active. Moreover, unlike over at the @BP_America account, whomever is running @oil_spill_2010 is trying to engage with others on Twitter: about 1-in-10 tweets is an @reply. That’s not very high, but that’s better than 1-in-100.

@BPGlobalPR
The dark horse in this race for followers is @BPGlobalPR, a spoof account. In less than a week, the account has grown to 15,222 followers: more than three times that of @BP_America and almost three times that of @oil_spill_2010. And it’s on more lists: 394.

More importantly, from a PR perspective, people are talking about it and retweeting one of its 59 tweets. As of this writing, there are 12,774 tweets that mention the keyword bpglobalpr.

What do these tweets look like? Here’s a sampling:

@BPGlobalPR Tweet Sample

Whomever is tweeting on the account has created the hashtag #bpcares (a play on @comcastcares?). Currently that hashtag appears on 1,875 tweets: that’s about 30 for each tweet that @BPGlobalPR has made.

Not The Only Spoof Account
The @BPGlobalPR account is not the only spoof or opposition account created in response to the disaster, although it has the most traction with followers. Related accounts include:

• @AngryOilyBird (established 1 May 2010 by Save The Pelican) — 57 tweets, 360 followers
• @boycottbp (established 1 May 2010) — 489 tweets, 1,032 followers
• @BP_Fail (established 16 May 2010) — 34 tweets, 21 followers
• @bpglobal (established 9 November 2009 by Tricia Blocker) — 0 tweets, 1 follower
• @BPGulfLeak (established 21 May 2010) — 295 tweets, 115 followers
• @BPOilSpill (established 30 April 2010 by R. Haggerty) — 8,149 tweets, 337 followers
• @DrilledByBP (established 22 May 2010 by Jon Brett and Brandon Shuler) — 7 tweets, 48 followers
• @HealthyGulf (established 18 August 2008) — 167 tweets, 366 followers
• @IBRRC (established 16 May 2009 by International Bird Rescue) — 1,010 tweets, 670 followers
• @makebppay (established 7 May 2010 by Keith Haggert) — 1,716 tweets, 86 followers
• @oil_leaks (established 17 September 2009) — 2,476 tweets, 1,787 followers
• @ProtectTheOcean (established 7 May 2010) — 101 tweets, 347 followers
• @SaveOurGulf (established 2 May 2010 by the Waterkeeper Alliance) — 53 tweets, 170 followers
• @SpillBabySpill (established 30 April 2010) — 383 tweets, 140 followers
• @SpillBPSpill (established 9 May 2010) — 277 tweets, 32 followers

The disaster in the Gulf of Mexico cannot be mitigated by effective communication: actions do speak louder than words. And Twitter is certainly not the make-or-break space for BP’s public image. However, as the service goes more mainstream, it serves as a mirror for attitudes that extend beyond the techno-elite, attitudes that are held by influencers of all stripes.

Ignore it at your own peril.

Resources:

• @BP_America archive
• @oil_spill_2010 archive
• @BPGlobalPR archive
• #bpcares archive (1,875 tweets)
• #bpoilspill archive (1,503 tweets)
• #oilspill archive (5,081 tweets)
• bpglobalpr (12,774 tweets)
• BP Gulf Disaster (list by BPGulfLeak)
• BP Oil Spill (list by Australian Journalist Helen Tzarimas)

:: This article first appeared at Wiredpen.com
:: Related: Oil Explosion InfoGraphic
:: Follow us on Twitter!

This Chicago Sun-Times article features Dietzler Farms (@DietzlerFarms) from Elkhart, Wisconsin.

Dietzler signed up for Twitter last year out of curiosity. Her first tweet was an open invitation for a rack of short ribs.

“Within three minutes, Phillip Foss [the chef at Lockwood] texted me and said, ‘I’ll take them all,’ ” she says. Her second tweet included the link to Foss’ blog, the Pickled Tongue, which had details of the dinner that would feature those ribs.

This is a great example of both B2B and B2C tweeting!

What other farms are using Twitter?

The latest “celebrity death” to make the rounds on Twitter happened mid-day Thursday and was fueled by mainstream Canadian press. The “Drudge-ification” of North American news seems complete.

What’s more interesting than the Twitterstream is how the media treated their stories after the false report (AKA rumor) was outed.

Trendistic

The Gordon Lightfoot story was relatively short-lived and did not reach stratospheric numbers on Twitter (about 0.25% of all tweets). Some have used the short-life as an example of Twitter’s ability to self-correct. I don’t think that’s really the case; people were still making “he’s dead” retweets that contained links to the updated CANWEST story. That’s tweeting before thinking, a behavior that we need to haze.

Case Number 1: Keep the link, update the story

CANWEST was widely criticized for running the initial story reporting that Gordon Lightfoot had died. But rather than kill the link to the story, the media organization continued to update the story.

And the URL remained the same.

This is a key best practice. The revised story appeared on all CANWEST websites, so if someone clicked a link in a tweet that said ‘Gordon Lightfoot is dead’ — the result would be the news that the singer/songwriter was very much alive. Unfortunately, lots of people retweet without checking out the link that’s in the tweet.

Case Number 2: Kill the link, pretend it never happened

The converse happend at CBC Radio3. Maybe their software doesn’t allow revisions; if that’s the case, it’s time for application surgery (or burial).

An Incomplete Paper (erh, electronic) Trail

These tweets were harvested using Twitter’s advanced search. I searched for “Lightfoot and dead” as well as “Lightfoot and not dead.” I searched for “Lightfoot and died” as well as “Lightfoot and not died.” I also have what I think is a comprehensive archive of tweets with links that go back to 11.23 AM, the earliest Tweet that I found.

This post first appeared at WiredPen