Never Cross Twitter-Audience Streams

I think by now we have all heard stories of how some company’s social media intern accidentally posted something stupid, controversial, politically charged, or otherwise inane, from an official profile.

So we all know that if you manage social media professionally, you *always* make sure you’re logged out of the corporate account before tweeting something completely stupid.

(Yes, I’m looking at you former-KitchenAid-social-media-manager….)

But what if you manage your own business or want to connect with people on social networks professionally? How do you connect with others in your industry AND shit talk your crazy in-laws behind their Facebook-back’s?

Simple: You create two Twitter accounts, and take advice from America’s favorite paranormal police:

How I keep from crossing the streams:

Twitter Account #1: For my professional life. I engage with over a thousand followers, tweet about my industry, and have it connected to my LinkedIn account. When I make new business contacts, I connect with them here.

Twitter Account #2: For my personal life. And man do I mean *per. son. al.* I tweet about my cat, my cramps, and my checkins on Foursquare. I also tweet about politics, especially during debates.

I have two accounts because my two personas have very, VERY different audiences. NOTHING I tweet to one audience is relevant to the other.

If you own a small business, or hope to recruit business on social networks, this is how you should run manage your accounts.

How an Asheville Wedding DJ crossed streams (and kinda pissed me off)

So, I’m getting married in Asheville and I am looking for a DJ to MC and spin our wedding at Homewood. Naturally, I used my personal Twitter account to do some research. Which is how I found this guy.

I started following him on Twitter, he started following me back. I reached out to him and put him in touch with Vince, we got a quote.

And dude is as expensive as our venue.

*cough$3500.00 for five hours of workcough*.

That sucks, but we weren’t ruling him out. Vince really liked what he offered, so we were scoping out other options and reevaluating about how badly we needed up lighting.

And then… the second presidential debate happened.

I was doin’ my thing – tweeting, re-tweeting, and otherwise hashtagging my way into Twitter political history – when I saw this pop up in my news feed:

Yes. Dude I am considering as a DJ for my wedding, who I would be paying almost twice the amount quoted by any other Wedding DJ in Asheville, has used his professional Twitter account to tell me he feels the President should move to Iraq…

He crossed the streams.

At first I was all like “um… what?”

Then I realized this was in response to my “GO OBAMA GO!” Tweet. (What can I say? I was excited dude showed up to the second debate.)

I checked out this DJ’s Twitter feed and sure enough, it is 99.8% committed to his business.

But there, nestled amongst all his DJ tweets and chatter about Traktor, is his public, politically-charged message to me…

So to this DJ who got *so* agitated at his potential client’s debate tweets that he reached out in a public forum and actively chose to lose business before taking a step back from his computer and thinking about his audience, I say this:

Seriously dude.

Honor the internet’s long tradition of dealing with people who have opinions different from your own and create a second, anonymous account to troll them and start fights.

And don’t cross the effing streams!

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