People can still be a little nervous about social media, and rightly so, to an extent.
Here's an excellent article from Maclean's demonstrating some social media horror stories, from the angle of people acting foolish and then losing their jobs, or being hounded themselves via social media.
The takeaway is that more so now than ever, you're expected to face the repercussions of your social media actions, and that could mean loss of employment -- sometimes within 24 hours as some of the examples in the article illustrate.
Twitter, especially, is instantaneous. You fire up that tweet, press send and it's already out there in the wild, sitting on a server for posterity. Maybe someone has already grabbed a screenshot of it, so no point pressing the delete button = too late. If someone searches your name in the future, that tweet/case study may pop up to follow you around.
Does Twitter need a 30-second "grace period" or an "undo send" option, similar to what Gmail recently made standard after years in beta? Possibly. It may take off, may not.
I think the point is to go retro. Before the Internet and social media were just a twinkle in the eye, businesses picked up the phone and spoke to people. That was the first impression that potential customers got.
A tweet is the same. It's just a shorter version via digital communications. The difference is that it can be shared more widely, much faster, and others can jump in and add their thoughts and comments on the interaction.
I think it's 50/50 at the moment = the "good news" tweets balance the bad examples. I know that social media monitoring software can measure the sentiment of reaction to a brand's tweets, but not sure if there's data analyzing Twitter as a whole entity to gauge if it was a "positive" or "negative" day, in general, for sentiment. Would be interesting to know. (Maybe looking at what's trending is the closest option?)
Typing in "twitter sentiment analysis" came up with these results, but they seem to be individual tools for keywords and brands, rather than Twitter as a whole for 24 hours.
See you in 140, and have a great weekend.
John.