It looks as if Stephen Fry is leaving the social network that he has helped to make famous. This morning he announced that aggression and unkindness had caused him to give up on twitter. It seems that an exchange with Richard from Birmingham or @brumplum as he is known was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The spat began with a bitchy if fairly unremarkable tweet from @brumplum in which he described Fry’s microblog contributions as a ‘bit boring’. Fry replied in kind and blocked the offending tweeter. Richard announced he’d been blocked and then referred to the national treasure in what might be considered homophobic terms if @brumplum was not himself openly gay.
Fry has left the door open for a return by saying that he’d see how he felt in a few days and there is already a twitter petition asking him to reconsider. Perhaps frustration with technology was getting Stephen down – both his Kodak printer and a Sony Vaio computer were playing up this morning and he was due to fly to America so the combined stress may have been a contributing factor. Fry’s follower list is very close to a million so he is a genuine standard-bearer for the network. We will now have to wait and see whether he is really joining the list of celebs that have lost faith with social networks or when spirits are higher he decides to twit again.
Thousands of twitter users have had their accounts hacked in the past three days. The hackers have used the accounts to send a deluge of direct messages with links to diets, sites offering colonic irrigation and the inevitable porn. It appears that affected users have been the victims of a phishing attack; they have been tricked into giving out their passwords either by registering for a dodgy twitter application or by being presented with a fake twitter login page.
One of the most powerful, authoritative and influential corporate voices in the world of UGC and the social web is that of Scott Monty, head of social media at Ford Motor Company, Detroit. He has over 30 thousand followers on twitter and is a genuine trail blazer in the use of social media marketing and PR techniques.
Here are the top five posts on the PR and the Social Web this September. They are ranked by number of views with the highest at number one.
PR and the Social Web 