Twitter Law

Since I first signed up for Twitter, I noticed that there were a number of celebrity accounts. Many of those accounts were set up by other people - other people not even associated with the celebrities, also known as "fake celebrities". You know, sites like "hugh_jackman" (aka: the Fake Hugh Jackman which is acceptable) instead of "RealHughJackman" only they claim to be the real deal. I always wondered how people could get away with this, after all, isn't this essentially stealing someone's identity?

A great example of this practice is the recent law suit by Tony La Russa, manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, against Twitter. A number of fake tweets were made in La Russa's name; apparently they weren't bad tweets but one did state something questionable and Mr. La Russa didn't like the fact that inpersonators were making any tweets in his name.

The Twitter gang claims that they've been on to this, and that the law suit wasn't necessary, but as a result of the legal action they're now requiring a verification process for celebrities, professional sports stars, government agencies and more. I hear that during the verification process, several accounts have been closed because the person/s who set them up did so under false pretenses. However, this is still in what they call an experimental phase.

According to Biz Stone, a founding father of Twitter, The experiment will begin with "public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other well-known individuals at risk of impersonation. "

I'd like to see this happen for businesses as well. We all need our identities protected. Otherwise, someone can start a twitter account that looks like a "real" business and say all kinds of things - for good or for bad. And it's the bad I'm concerned about. Social media and online reputation work hand in hand and each business needs to know if there are other twitter accounts with their business name as well as the comments that are made by others. The main objective is to uncover negative comments and respond quickly to them and this reputation management is and will continue to be a challenge as long as others can freely post whatever they want, true or false, online. (This is a topic for another post and article.)

Twitter plans to offer the verification process for other not-so-famous people in the future, but it's not clear when that will happen. According to Biz Stone, they hope to eventually verify more accounts but that due to the resources required it will start with a small group and potentially grow from there.

What does this mean to us, the small business owner? The larger companies will most likely be verified before we are. Therefore, we need to be proactive. Search twitter for your own name and your business name to see what you find. If there's someone else out there tweeting under your name, report it to twitter right away. Twitter has closed down accounts in the past and I'm sure that they will take complaints seriously.

Banks Tweet & Post

Bank of America and Wells Fargo are just a couple of the big banks that have adopted twitter for customer service. The word is they are still working on how to do it efficiently and frequently, but they have some forward thinking people who are giving it a good shot.

Citigroup is on facebook. I heard on NECN that their last post was February 23rd though. I bet that since the television news report this morning that someone from a more local branch (as in state-side) will update it and I don't think canceling the account is a good idea for them. Here's the clip:



As for me, I'm so busy I usually forget to blog, tweet and update my facebook. So who am I to talk?