Twitter: The personal becomes public: By now, many people — even those who aren’t on Twitter — have probably heard about an incident earlier this week involving a reporter at the National Post (a daily newspaper in Toronto) and a “Twitter meltdown” that he had, in which he posted half a dozen obscenity-laced messages directed at a marketing person he had tried to interview. [...]
One of the reasons I think many people are drawn to Twitter is that — like a lot of other social media tools — it provides a kind of personal touch to our relationships, even with people we don’t know. Is that a good thing? I think so, or at least most of the time I think it is. Occasionally, however, that blurring of the line between the personal and the professional gets crossed, and it can cause problems. The reporter in this case certainly found that out, after he was dragged into his boss’s office and forced to delete his Twitter posts (which someone had already thoughtfully made a screen grab of).
