There’s an article in this month’s Vanity Fair focusing on “America’s Tweethearts.” The piece highlights a handful of women who have “tweeted” themselves into celebrity. Each boasts between 33,000 and 1.4 million followers on Twitter and raves about how micro-blogging has skyrocketed her career. But it was the paragraph about travel journalist Stefanie Michaels that spurred discussion in my own house:
Real-world friends, and even spouses, can be left in the cold. Michaels’s husband, a real-estate appraiser with horn-rims and a crew cut—a “normy”—calls himself “the Twidower.” “My wife found Twitter and dropped me,” he says. “I basically lost my wife.” Then he sighs. “Sometimes, during dinner, it gets to be too much.”
So how much Twitter is too much Twitter?
I’ve spent hours on Twitter chronicling campus events and received incredible feedback. Yet while lunching with my wife, her answer was simple: “If you tried to Twitter our lunch right now I’d smack that iPhone out of your hand.” OK, so there’s probably a happy medium, right?
The purpose of Twitter should be to augment the conversation occurring around you, not replace it.
So maybe most of these are common sense, but here are my “7 Rules of Practicing Proper Twitter Etiquette:”
- Unless the person is a public speaker, speaking in public, ask them for permission if they’re to be named in a tweet. You want to offer up-to-the minute commentary on Barack Obama’s latest address. Great. Just try not to chronicle the bite-by-bite lunch you shared with a coworker.
- It’s not cool to whip out your iPhone at any given time. Movies, weddings, the birth of a child. Some moments aren’t app-friendly.
- Keep updates/alerts on vibrate, or, better yet, silent. Unless you’re an emergency room physician or you hold the keys to a nuclear launch facility, there’s probably few messages that need immediate attention. Check it when you can, but don’t allow a virtual conversation to interrupt a real one.
- Don’t TwitPic an identifiable person without permission. How many embarrassing moments does your life hold? Want someone to go back in time and post pictures of them online?
- It’s OK to be curious, but it’s not cool to read tweets over someone’s shoulder. Curiosity is what got most people into Twitter in the first place. Asking about the technology, how someone tweets or what they tweet is cool. Looking over their shoulder to do it is not.
- Don’t tweet anything you’ll have to explain to your mom, kids, boss or coworkers. Tweets — like Facebook pics and blogger posts — have an amazing shelf life and an uncanny ability to find the one person you would least like to read them.
- Above all else, use common sense. Think a drafted tweet is too mean? It probably is. Not sure if it’s cool to pop out your iPhone in a meeting. It’s probably not.
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