What to make of it all.

By now you have no doubt read or heard, in Crains, the Detroit News,
WWJ’s Great Lakes IT Report, Fox-2 News and national PR industry journals, that our Twitter name/page was hijacked, used for nefarious, vindictive purposes and, ultimately, via Twitter and the legal system, provided to us. At the same time, we learned, via their IP address “virtual fingerprint,” who was responsible.

The “takeaways” are many:

• Social media is continually evolving; a moving target that can be difficult to control and police

• Twitter, with a staff far too small to adequately handle such oversight and timely customer service, did the right thing. No doubt they, like us, want to set precedents and deterrents that protect the integrity of their tweeters, company and the medium

• The legal system worked. Within a month of filing our federal lawsuit against “John Doe” (NOT Twitter), we had what we asked for—namely—our name

• No matter how many safeguards you put into place, if someone wants to “break into your house,” they will do so

So, what’s next? We’ll decide after consulting further with our legal counsel.

Finally, we have been asked many times by the media and our supporters what we have to say to the culprits. We won’t go there. However, we will say that, in general and as we have said before, anyone who would perpetrate such a fraud is apparently without ethics, obviously desperate and, it would appear, possessing of a lot of extra free time. One would wonder if such a perpetrator’s clients realize how they’re spending their time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 1:21 pm by Don Tanner and is filed under Don Tanner, Social media, Uncategorized, adversity management, branding, ethics, public relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.