Proving that it pays to know whether your social media tactics are engaging or enraging your audience, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich managed to shoot himself in the foot, via Twitter, not once, but twice in the last month.
First he threatened legal action against a Twitter user and Twitter itself, a false alarm stemming from apparent confusion about how the social media tool works. Then he tweeted some sizzling political invective in the direction of Supreme Court nominee and Court of Appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor, which he then had to recant.
Gingrich, an avid and stylish tweeter, probably misunderstood how tweets work when he instructed his attorney to send a cease and desist letter to a twitter user. The tweet was:
The cease and desist letter claimed trademark infringement and threatened to sue the twitter user, Twitter and a whole list of others. What Gingrich apparently didn't know was that the @ sign with someone's twitter user name means that the correspondence is directed at them, like "Dear Newt Gingrich." Hardly a cause for litigation.
Then to make things worse, just last week, Gingrich joined with right-wing talk radio host, Rush Limbaugh, and tweeted his own message, saying that he considered Judge Sotomayor a racist, based on contraversial comments she made in 2001. The term "racist" bothered a few high ranking Republicans and a few days later Gingrich recanted, calling his words "harsh". He posted this recant on his website, claiming that his initial reaction was "strong and direct -- perhaps too strong and too direct."
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All told, Ginrich is to be applauded for using social media to engage his audience in new ways, even if he is tripping over his own tweets a bit. Newt has a wonderful future on the social media frontier. He just needs to remember to “think before you tweet.” A lesson for us all, to be sure.
First he threatened legal action against a Twitter user and Twitter itself, a false alarm stemming from apparent confusion about how the social media tool works. Then he tweeted some sizzling political invective in the direction of Supreme Court nominee and Court of Appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor, which he then had to recant.
Gingrich, an avid and stylish tweeter, probably misunderstood how tweets work when he instructed his attorney to send a cease and desist letter to a twitter user. The tweet was:
“Join @newtgingrich @sanuzis in signing the EFCA Freedom Not Fear petition at http://action.americanright… WSJ".Gingrich opposes the EFCA (the Employee Free Choice Act).
The cease and desist letter claimed trademark infringement and threatened to sue the twitter user, Twitter and a whole list of others. What Gingrich apparently didn't know was that the @ sign with someone's twitter user name means that the correspondence is directed at them, like "Dear Newt Gingrich." Hardly a cause for litigation.
Then to make things worse, just last week, Gingrich joined with right-wing talk radio host, Rush Limbaugh, and tweeted his own message, saying that he considered Judge Sotomayor a racist, based on contraversial comments she made in 2001. The term "racist" bothered a few high ranking Republicans and a few days later Gingrich recanted, calling his words "harsh". He posted this recant on his website, claiming that his initial reaction was "strong and direct -- perhaps too strong and too direct."
.
All told, Ginrich is to be applauded for using social media to engage his audience in new ways, even if he is tripping over his own tweets a bit. Newt has a wonderful future on the social media frontier. He just needs to remember to “think before you tweet.” A lesson for us all, to be sure.
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