Leadamo Academy bases its blogs on twitter. We have covered many topics in the last year including building  twitter connections /and hashtags   for example but rarely talk about twitter as an entity.

Twitter and racism; is there a connection asks Leadamo Academy?

It was interesting therefore to find a study by the think tank Demos. As a knee jerk reaction their study could be interpreted like this: maybe twitter is being used as a mouthpiece for racism. The big headline was:

 ‘10 000 racist tweets a day’.

But hold on, these tweets, at first glance, might be considered offensive, racist or a slur but are they really?

Now bearing in mind we are talking 200 million tweets a day globally and a sample of just under 127 000 was analysed, Leadamo Academy will leave you to decide on the maths. These were all tweets only in English and were taken from a sample over 9 days. The whole aim of the study was to evaluate just how racist twitter users might be.

 People use casually racist terms

Their conclusion demonstrated ‘white boy’ is being used as the slur of choice. Pertinently it’s about how the language was used rather than the words themselves, if there is such a differentiation. People use casually racist terms as part of their everyday language or to form part of a solidarity within a specific group. Is this something acceptable, or not? What do you think? Do let us know,

Certainly twitter will end up being a massive language database for the future.

What an amazing way to learn about just how everyday language is used in the twenty first century? Our communication will be analysed like never before.  Think about how people use twitter to show negative stereotypes; how many examples of the casual use of slurs have you seen? Have you ever witnessed targeted abuse or something that is unacceptably ideologically driven. It’s certainly something that should be uppermost as we take to this popular platform.

The problem is that we are usually missing the context in a tweet.

Context usually comprises 90% of meaning. It is so easy to be misinterpreted. Therefore Leadamo has constructed some top tips for SMEs to consider and so avoid offence. After all, a mistimed, misjudged tweet can have a profoundly damaging impact on your business and the target whether that was the intention or not.

Leadamo Academy’s Top 10 Tips to keep your business twitter account clean

1. twitter is a public forum. If you want to use banter, best do it offline. It remains ‘in print’ long after you might have forgotten it. With 204 million active twitter users you can easily offend someone with your version of humour.
2. One football  player was fined in 2013 for adding  the hash-tag phrase ‘cheating b*****d’ to a Tweet about the performance of a referee. What you might say and do in the heat of the moment may come back to haunt your business dramatically. If in doubt don’t tweet.
3. There is a hair’s breadth between having the freedom to express opinions and actually causing hurt and this is worth considering before you tweet. Would I be happy to read this tweet?
4. Take care regarding movements, influencers and campaigns you align yourself with as a business. Your business can be swept away too in associative bad publicity. What you do privately is one thing but very different for a business
5. Remember twitter is an open platform you can’t do anything confidentially so don’t pass over proprietary information. Your competitors will see it!
6. Make sure you leave some space for a RT –it’s being kind and encourages people to do just that. Make sure you don’t change the content of a retweet.
7. The DM is an interesting one. It is very annoying and blatant opportunism to Direct Message someone with out and out promotion. It’s like shouting in their ear. Don’t do it!
8. Be helpful, be special, be kind. People remember those who reach out, who make meaningful conversations and who don’t appear to be in it just for themselves. Twitter is not like real life but that doesn’t mean we should abandon all etiquette behind 140 characters.
9. Use hashtags sensitively. Don’t just jump on todays’ flavour otherwise it will be treated as spam

10. It’s interesting to see how the line has been blurred regarding the names people have chosen as handles. Let’s put it this way, there are no holds barred. All we can say is choose your twitter identity very carefully for your business. Also make sure that if words are put together they don’t spell something else entirely. This has been known to happen and will leave that to your imagination.