PR and the Social Web

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.