A few days ago, @adebradley posed a question on twitter: he wondered what people aim to get out of a twitterstorm. The point being: is creating a kerfuffle on twitter simply preaching to the converted, as they furiously retweet?
He mentions this as someone who’s created one: a few months ago, he was with a group of people who were refused service in a pub, because they were gay. He posted a message on twitter, and cue outrage from many quarters. If it had stopped there, then the answer is probably: not much point at all.
But the news was picked up by the BBC and was posted to their website. Questions were asked of the pub’s head office, and presumably heads rolled.
@LauraBeddington described herself, until a few days ago, as a “magistrate who loves holidays and a nice cup of tea”. That was until @robangus investigated and found that she’s not a magistrate at all.
Her profile consists of tweets aimed mostly at celebrities telling them to change their homosexual ways. She also replies to some of the vitriolic abuse she receives by telling people they must also change.
What puzzles me is whether she’s a real person, with real views, or whether she’s deliberately being inflammatory in order to get attention. There are several clues:
She’s clearly loving the attention.
Like the fake profiles of the Queen, the Prime Minister, the deputy PM and all the others, the main aim seems to be, like many twitterstorms, to inflate the ego of those who started them. There’s nothing better than seeing your name trending on twitter – even if it’s for the briefest of moments.
In the case of the gay pub service twitterstorm, of course, being spotted by BBC journalists meant Ade’s case got reported by mainstream media. Perhaps creating a storm in the teacup that is twitter can have an effect, but it’s just as likely that no-one notices, and that actually it doesn’t really matter.
Just like when the press created a storm out of Gordon Brown’s bigoted woman, within days everyone else will have moved on.
Thanks for the mention in this. It’s quite an interesting topic. I did a bit of an analysis on greencoat boy on my own blog: http://pureprgenius.com/2010/06/07/the-greencoat-boy-and-i-a-case-study-of-a-twitterstorm/
In that case there was a little bit of an ends in mind, with twitter seen as the tool.
Very often though, the storms get whipped up with out any thinking of what the end result will be.