Have you ever noticed that a lot of the time professional newscasters and other people not "in the know" tend to use the wrong words for things? Strangely enough, I recently saw it happen in reverse. Last week I was watching a news program and they had a special guest on the program to discus the growing trend of businesses using twitter to communicate with their customer base. Sounds like a reasonable news story, right? There was only one problem, the "Social Media Professional" continuously referred to the act of sharing a message on twitter as "twittering", the correct terminology of course being "tweeting". Now this wouldn't be a big deal except the person speaking was hired as an expert, and he clearly was not an expert if he couldn't even speak using the correct terminology.
The words we use to describe what we do are important, even when it comes to something that many people might consider trivial, like Twitter. If someone was to go into a job interview for a corporate communications position, and went on and on about twittering, while at the same time stating they were on top of internet media trends, they probably wouldn't get very far into the selection process. Just something to keep in mind.
Yes be weary of experts and analysts! I feel like most of them said something interesting on the topic while out drinking with the producers and were thus brought on to rant the next day about it. By the way, do you use twitter a lot?
ReplyDeleteI was watching Couples Retreat and the one guy called it "twatting" lol - but that was an intentional joke hehe
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