Tweet-Splurge

I got annoyed today, and vented on Twitter, which is the height of bad manners.

For that, I apologise.

However, I stand by my point. Basically, I had a minute of breathing space in what had turned out to be another mental day, so thought I'd catch up with the twitterverse, see what people thought of Shk Ahmed' mistress heading to the UK, and marvel at the blessed lack of celebrity focused chat from the cloud of people I follow.

Then my whole feed column that displays people I follow was suddenly full of tweets from one person - all packed with detail, but when 8 tweets that all start with the same three letter acronym are stacked on top of one another, it is hard to muster the will to sift through them.

As the topic does interest me, I clicked on two of the links in a random selection of the spammed tweets. The first was to the brochure of the event which was tweeting.. And to be honest, that was enough - I closed the link and moved on.

Oh, and posted a grumpy tweet to them telling them I was annoyed.

See, the thing is, the event is being held by one of the really reputable big media houses in the uk; one that is supposed to 'get' social media.

And the event? It's all about social media.

Yet in my opinion, this vomit of tweets, all in one go, worded with marketing at top priority, and comms with the twitterverse somewhere around the 4th or 5th mark.

Learnings, for me?
* stagger your tweets.
Don't be ashamed of using this as a marketing tool, but just as you wouldn't ring one journalist and babble through a list of 8 clients, and expect them to do the work picking through the blurb, time your tweets. Make sure the people you're headlining know when it's going out, so they can give people in their company the heads up to retweet it, start conversations around the topics, get your brand some credibility.
* don't clutter
Sticking your website as a bit.ly link in a tweet w/out reason wastes space and diminshes my respect for you and your brand. If I follow you, I know this info already. If I don't, I'll click on your user profile and find it. The 140 is not the place for back-up / support info.

That's it for now, as I'm on the blackberry in a traffic jam. I'll review when I'm slightly less irate. Do I stick to these rules religiously? No - but I represent brand-me, so I'm allowed to be erratic and indecisive. But when you're tweeting on behalf of a 'cutting edge' social media event, you should be getting this stuff right.