Twitter claims its first scalp of the general election campaign
It turns out old Tweets can come back to haunt you! Or at least derail your political aspirations. Yes, social media has claimed its first scalp with Twitter drawing first blood on the election trail.
Amid the fury about Stuart MacLennan’s offensive tweets it is largely being lost that most are actually over a year old. While he has been quick to apologise and initially dismissed "a young candidate and has been very foolish indeed", he was ultimately sacked as the row escalated.
I do not feel the need to repeat MacLennan’s myriad abusive tweets here on the Morgan PR blog, suffice to say they were foolish tweets way back in 2009 and they were always going to come back and haunt him once he was a Scottish Labour Party candidate.
That said, there are some lessons here that we can all learn from. For starters, delete any tweets you are less than proud of as soon as possible via your Twitter account. They may have been indexed by Google but can be hard to track down without knowing the exact language, so it is never too late to delete them. Unless you are Stuart MacLennan!
Also, consider who are you following? Labour politicians who were following Stuart MacLennan are being criticised for not acting sooner. There is no evidence they ever retweeted his abusive tweets – they are being tarred with the same brush; guilty by association, even though it is quite possible as busy politicians they never saw the tweets in the first place!
It can be a challenge, but the fewer followers you have the more culpable you can be. I’d like to think with well over 12,000 followers across our three main Twitter accounts - @Nigel_Morgan, @MorganPR and @DailyPRTips – I could be forgiven for following the odd problematic Twitter! That doesn’t mean I do not try not to follow the pyramid schemers, the spammers and the vulgar, foul mouthed feathery folk on Twitter.
For example, a little why back I stopped following Brad Burton from 4Networking. I like Brad and enjoy 4Networking but he was a little too partial to swearing among his prolific tweets. Which is fair enough and I’m no prude, but when showing clients how Twitter could be used, his were not tweets I wanted popping up! I blogged about Why swearing on Twitter is bad for your reputation around the same time a certain Labour wannabe was swearing on Twitter! Shame he hadn't been following me eh?
So while you might be running a business as opposed to running for parliament, do just stop and think what the people you follow on Twitter say about you, and of course what you say for yourself.