Too many tweets make a….

Last year, our now Prime Minister, David Cameron made the legendary comment about Twitter. Admittedly on Absolute Radio not Radio 4 were he is pictured above* – but that’s not the point.

I was searching through twitter recently, looking up references to a particular radio station. I found a tweet from a presenter at the station, from their own personal twitter account, which if you didn’t know that the person was a presenter on Radio Smallsville you’d probably not know the connection.

That was until they tweeted that they had some “Professional publicity pictures for Radio Smallsville taken yesterday” which they were not impressed with (you got the feeling they are one of those people who hate having their picture taken.)

So having wetted my appetite I checked out their other tweets – the next one “went out and got completely wasted last night” (or something along them lines – it may have been worded a bit stronger than that.)

As far as I know this presenter has never promoted the fact that they are on twitter ‘on-air’ – nor made any pretence that their Twitter feed is officially endorsed by Radio Smallsville. But never the less to the end reader just finding the person they heard on the radio on twitter “could” by association of taking about the radio station and their behaviour outside the studio make the radio station be seen in a negative light. Of course it could just reinforce to the reader that the presenter is a real person just like them.

Adds another dimension to what a radio presenter should and shouldn’t be posting on-line in a personal capacity, and what station management should be requiring their presenters to do.

Now as you may have guessed the Radio Smallsville presenter in question is a volunteer – so raises even more interesting issues when it is not a contacted employee you are dealing with.

* I’ve used the photo of Mr C at the beeb as they have published this under a Creative Commons licence – thus I can use it here, were as I couldn’t find an Absolute Radio picture under similar terms.