The other day I got a spammy DM from @seo_specialist – it said ‘Visit my site and click on my Adsense at [site removed].
It’s not the first of it’s kind I’ve received, but it bugged me, so I tweeted out:
Moan put out into the Twitterverse, I disappeared off to do something else, and thought nothing of it.
When I got back, I noticed the following Tweet in the @ column of Tweetdeck:
Wondering what I’d been ‘busted’ for – I traced the Tweet back and found that Chris Brogan had retweeted my original tweet moaning about being spam DMed. Many of Chris’s followers had also retweeted it, but as a retweet of a retweet, 140 characters wasn’t quite enough, so some of them had condensed it a little, which had resulted in it looking as if Chris had sent ME a message saying “I guess you’re not really a SEO specialistif you have to DM me to click on your adsense links”.
So basically, the gist of the original tweet (which was me complaining about someone else) had been lost, and who knows how many people now think that Chris ‘busted’ me for begging for Adsense clicks? Luckily I caught @justinrains message and was able to clear up the misunderstanding with him, but I wonder how many people think I’m an Adsense spammer just from a couple of retweets?
It just goes to show, be careful what you retweet, and be careful how you phrase it – not everyone will read the end message the same as how it began!
Yep, chinese whispers on twitter can go pear shaped quite quick with RT.
Salutory lesson though. It is amazing how many of us put things in public though ( twitterverse, facebook walls, forums etc etc) when it should be in private eg email, DM, PM etc. Are we losing all our social conventions? If someone were to take offence to a private message and put it in the public domain, then the original sender is far better protected from misunderstandings etc. If having a go at someone in public rather than in private, I guess it is always far easier for a third party to get involved and then a 4th, 5th, nth RT to get the story wrong.
Maybe encrypted email with PGP when moaning at someone from now on??!!