What would happen if your Governor — not the press secretary but the Governor — suddenly blocked specific journalists from attending press conferences?

In a perfect world, newspaper editors and TV station news managers would tell the Governor that he didn’t get to decide who reports on the business of the state.

Down in Texas, we have a one-step-removed situation that illustrates one challenge of our 24x7, always on, 21st century life: negotiating the dividing line between public and private life, especially when you are an elected official.

On Monday, Dallas Morning News reporter @TomBenning told the world, on a DallasNews.com blog, that when he tried to follow @GovernorPerry, he encountered this message:

Could not follow user: You have been blocked from following this account at the request of the user.

If you think of public tweets as being, well, official statements from the Governor, then you are probably aghast that Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) [@GovernorPerry] is blocking journalists to keep them from following his tweets on his “personal” Twitter account. The one with more than 37,000 followers that he opened on January 01, 2009. The official account (@TexGov, opened on January 21, 2009) has less than 6,000 followers and is a push account for the press office, based on its level (or lack thereof) of interactivity.

@Replies For @GovernorPerry

Set aside for the moment the futility of blocking access to a public account.

Rick Perry lives in the public light. His account is officially “personal” but in actuality it is anything but personal: his @ replies account for less than 4 percent of his total tweetstream; an “@ reply” is direct conversational interaction with another Twitter account. In other words, Perry uses @GovernorPerry as a megaphone, not a telephone.

Tweet Stats For @GovernorPerry, Feb 2011

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that Twitter can be an effective tool, whether it’s being used to develop relationships and cultivate conversation or whether it’s being used as a broadcast tool. But I don’t characterize “broadcast” as “personal.”

Moreover, in recent months, Perry tweets on average less than once a day. His peak usage was March 2009, when he averaged four tweets/day. So it’s not like he’s saying much with his megaphone.

Clearly, Governor Perry’s press secretary thought about these issues before answering Benning’s email inquiry (emphasis added):

Yes, it is the governor’s personal account, so he manages it as he likes. He uses non-state resources.

Interface Used To Tweet By @GovernorPerry

If Governor Perry used state resources, his legal position would be clear: no blockage of journalists allowed.

What’s not clear is the accuracy of that statement, given that TweetStats shows that most of the tweets from @GovernorPerry are not made on a Blackberry (possibly a personal device) but are made from Twitter’s web interface. Web interface means computer, not a mobile browser.

Moreover, an analysis of a random selection of tweets from 2011 shows that several were made during normal business hours and days. Does the Governor really have two computers at his desk? Or regularly work from home?

Regardless, Perry’s account blocking is little more than a speedbump.

Regardless, Perry’s account blocking is more more than a speedbump.

Any reporter (or progressive blocker) who wants to know what Perry is saying on his public “personal” account can do so by subscribing to the RSS feed of the account.

And should you not use an RSS reader regularly, Benning reports that TCU journalism instructor Andrew Chavez (@adchavez) created a Google Docs application (bit.ly/guvtweets) to have those tweets delivered via email.

Finally, this is not the first time that Perry has prevented those who write about him from actively following his account. Last year, the Statesman reported that Katherine Haenschen, who writes for Burnt Orange Report, keeps a Twitter list of Texans blocked by @GovernorPerry.

Your feelings on the candidate Perry’s blockage of “progressive bloggers” may be less cut-and-dried, but the question raised then is the same as today: what is the line between “public” and “private” life for an elected public official in an always on world.

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Tools Used In This Story

• TweetStats
• TwitterGrader
• Storify

What changed in how people read their Tweetstream while UberTwitter and Twidroyd were shut off from the Twitter API?

Twitter for Blackberry got a big (more than 50%) boost, which suggests that at least some UberTwitter customers opted for a new client. TweetDeck lost share, which doesn’t make sense (it wasn’t blocked) but moved up in ranking. Another ranking boost: the Mobile Web moved from position six to position five, suggesting some of those Blackberry and Android customers simply switched to their browsers.

The web and Twitter for the iPhone were unchanged.

These data for “last day” (contrasted with “last hour” or “last week”) are from TwitterStream. I’ve interpreted “last day” to be “yesterday” — technically it is the preceding 24 hours (data accessed at 1.33 pm Pacific). Here are the rankings:

1. The web: Thursday — 35%; Friday — 35%
2. Thursday: UberTwitter — 7.3%; Friday — Twitter for Blackberry — 10.7%
3. Twitter for iPhone: Thursday –6.6%; Friday — 6.7%
4. Thursday: Twitter for Blackberry– 6.2%; Friday — Tweetdeck — 4.9%
5. Thursday: Tweetdeck: 5.3%; Friday — Mobile Web — 2.95%

Looking at UberMedia client traffic for last week shows that the company accounted for a little more than 10% of total traffic. However, the two affected applications, together, accounted for less than 8%. This is because Twitter did not block Echofon on Friday and remained at position seven (7), the same position it held last week.

• UberTwitter (Blackberry and iPhone) : 7.0%
• Echofon (iPhone) : 2.76%
• Twidroyd (Android) : 0.82%

There’s been a lot of chatter about why Twitter did what it did and why UberMedia did what it did. That’s for another post.

On Friday, I analyzed how people read tweets using Twitter client data from TwitterSource. This post analyzed what happened in the 24 hours following that post.

Twitter Traffic By Client For Feb 18 2011 — Data From TwitterSource.info

:: Permalink : Follow me on Twitter!

To put into perspective the impact of Twitter’s having shut down UberTwitter and Twidroyd today, look at these data from TwitterSource for “last day” (which one assumes means yesterday) on the various ways people read their Tweetstream:

1. The web: 35%
2. Ubertwitter: 7.3%
3. Twitter for iPhone: 6.6%
4. Twitter for Blackberry: 6.2%
5. Tweetdeck: 5.3%

Shutting down 7 percent of your traffic? Ballsy. That must be a serious policy violation: TechCrunch reports that at least part of the complain was trademark violation. According to UberMedia exec Bill Gross, the app is being renamed @UberSocial and all is well:

#UberTwitter & #Twidroyd users: We have made the changes Twitter requested. As soon as Twitter reactivates, you will be live again. Thx!

Ubertwitter is a popular Blackberry client but they also make (made?) an iPhone client; Twidroyd is the “number one” Android client.

Note that these data relate to traffic, not people. Many people use multiple tools to access Twitter. The chart and data are from TwitterSource, which uses a 5 percent random sample of publicly posted messages, the Twitter streaming API’s sample resource.

How People Read Tweets via TwitterSource “Last Day”

The California gubernatorial race took a humorous turn on Monday when a retweet was a missing letter from the URL it was promoting.

Sarah Pompei, a Meg Whitman spokeswoman, had intended to retweet a post from Whitman adviser Mike Murphy. Murphy’s tweet proclaimed:

Murphy Tweet Includes Link To Endorsement

But when Pompei copied and pasted the tweet, so that she could add an editorial tidbit, she left out the last letter in the bit.ly URL:

Pompei’s Tweet Includes An Errant Link

To her credit, Pompei hasn’t (yet) deleted the tweet, which had been retweeted 82 times as of this writing. But instead of linking to the press release where Whitman announces the endorsement of the Deputy Sheriff’s Association of San Diego County, the tweet linked to a June 2009 YouTube clip of what appears to be an amazing bass player. (Calling someone who speaks Japanese who can tell us something about the song!) Of course, the press release might get even more attention with this faux pas.

I have to take issue with the LA Times blog headline: this does not “underscore the dangers of tweeting”! The error could have happened with a copy-and-paste for an email.

TIP: LA Times PolitiCal blog and @tkallinen.

On September 11, the Washington Post claimed that Rev. Terry Jones kicked off the campaign for his International Burn A Koran Day on July 12 on Twitter. When I began researching the claims in the article, I found errors and holes, as this post documents. The post was developed on Storify, a platform that extends the concept of Posterous, making it very easy to pull snippets of information from the web and pull them into (one hopes) a coherent whole.

USA Today features Chicago restaurant Wow Bao (@BaoMouth), “an upscale fast food place,” as an example of how food service is using Twitter to respond to digital word-of-mouth.

Geoff Alexander, managing partner of Wow Bao, explained his company’s Twitter commitment like this: If somebody has 1,000 followers and writes a negative Tweet about Wow Bao, then 1,000 people could think the restaurant is bad. But if Wow Bao publicly responds to that Tweet, 1,000 people may see the issue is being handled.

The article also notes that Graham Elliot (@GrahamElliot), owner of Chicago’s Graham Elliot Restaurant and judge on Fox’s reality TV show MasterChef, writes his own tweets because he “wants his Twitter voice to be in line with the brand.”

“It’s great to have this wall torn down,” Elliot said. “Most of the time, people just want to be heard.”

Stats: @GrahamElliot

• 1,557 Tweets
• 5,716 Followers
• 516 Lists
• Following 0
• @ replies: 30.89%
• RT: 5.14%

Stats: @BaoMouth

• 8,658 Tweets
• 1,729 Followers
• 253 Lists
• Following 991
• @ replies: 21.34%
• RT: 60.41%

If I asked you to tell me which professions have the deepest Rolodex, I bet you wouldn’t start out with computer programming or accounting. I’m guessing you’d list marketing, sales, HR (recruiters, anyway) and PR. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that marketing and human resources/recruiting were the most “social jobs” on thejust-released NetProspex Social Index (NPSI), which is based on a database of “crowdsourced business contacts” (tip: TechFlash). The NPSI is a function of three things:

• Social Connectedness: how many people had more than one social media profile (according to the website, these are Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn)
• Social Friendliness and Reach: the average number of connections per person across major social networks
• Social Activity is based entirely on Twitter stats: number of tweets, number of followers, and number of people followed

What’s not clear is how NetProspex clumped jobs together.

For example, there is an “IT” job but also a Chief Information Officer. (These two distinctions were lumped into one for the winner, marketing.) What is an “IT” job? It’s not technical support, which had its own category. Later in the report it is defined as “IT directors/managers.” By reading the website, I can further refine this as “people who recommend and buy products” in this sector, otherwise known as “prospects.” So calling these categories “jobs” is also misleading; we’re really talking about senior managers.

According to the NetProspex data, Google leads the pack as far as employees, classified as a B2B prospects, who use Twitter. It’s not clear how important having a Twitter account is versus having a lot of followers; the algorithm used to make the determination is not explained. [This is not to the time to explain why number of followers or number followed are not good measures of success on Twitter.] Nor is there any reference to total employees; I’ve added that in parens where it was easily found.

1. Google  (21,805, Mountain View)
2. The Walt Disney Co. (144,000, Burbank)
3. Live Nation, Inc. (4,300, Beverly Hills)
4. Amazon.com, Inc. (28,300, Seattle)
5. Adobe (8,660, San Jose)
6. Dell Inc. (94,300, Texas)
7. Brinker International (100,400, Dallas)
8. Juniper Networks Inc. (7,732, Sunnyvale)
9. Best Buy Co., Inc. (180,000, Minnesota)
10. Computer Associates
11. Cisco Systems (70,700, San Jose)
12. Intel Corporation (80,400, Santa Clara)
13. Yum Brands Inc. (49,000, Louisville)
14. Sun Microsystems Inc. (GoogleFinance, UK)
15. eBay Inc. (16,400, San Jose)
16. Intuit Inc. (7,700, Mountain View)
17. Iron Mountain Incorporated (10,500, Boston)
18. EMC Corporation (43,200, Massachusetts)
19. Microsoft Corporation (89,000, Redmond)
20. Motorola Inc. (53,000, Illinois)

What do these organizations have in common? California and technology! Two are food-related; two are entertainment; one is retail — but technology; 13 are headquartered in California (+Sun, which used to be headquartered there).  Technology managers and executives using technology to network? Let’s chant in unison:  “doh!”

It’s hard to reconcile this chart with one that says New York City wins the “most business people who tweet” contest. The measurements are the same: number of tweets, number followed, number of followers. According to this measurement, the top five are New York, San Francisco, Washington, DC., Sacramento, and Phoenix. And remember: it’s not “business people” per se it’s “B2B prospects.”

Are you a prospect? Go check out the database.

Checking my own name makes the claim of database verification … questionable:

NetProspex Search Results For Kathy Gill

First, the HTML Writers Guild board position was a volunteer slot … in the 1990s. So it’s not possible that this contact could have been verified in January 2010. I suppose it’s possible that there is another Kathy Gill on the board; however, the Guild doesn’t list members.

Second, I haven’t written for About.com since March 2009 … and even then I had no power to recommend or authorize business purchases.

Third, a Portland-based Kathy Gill, who is a B2B prospect based on her senior position with an agency, isn’t on the list!

Of course, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to actually fix one’s profile, not that I want to be a marketing target.

Summary: Grains of salt needed.

:: UWTwitterBook permalink : Follow Us On Twitter!

Twitter explains the “onmouseover” exploit from Tuesday and says it has nothing to do with “New Twitter.” More at Twitter blog.

What does the new interface mean for branding on Twitter, whether personal branding or organizational branding? The most straightforward impact: background images will need to be redesigned. More from Forrester.

In an interview at Dangerous Minds, William Gibson (@GreatDismal) raves (in an understated way) about Twitter.

Q: Every morning, when you fire up your computer, where do you start looking?

A: Twitter… I find Twitter to be the most powerful aggregator of sheer (shared?) novelty that humanity has yet possessed… Quite seriously. If you are following the right 70 people, and each of them is a full-on aggregator of novelty, you’re getting their picks… It’s like you’re getting this incredible triple-filtered hit. It would be the 1990s equivalent of a shopping bag filled with $500 of imported magazines.

Q: Who on Twitter do you follow that has the best information?

A: I don’t think I have one favorite .… The people who provide me with the most novel and diverse material are often people who have no particular reputation for doing that.… You can date the entry of Twitter into my manuscript by the porn bot reference. They’re gone now.

Q: Steven Johnson was writing about Twitter in TIME magazine and he said that you have a peripheral awareness of a lot of things… you’re getting things in the ether, around you… Do you think that fringe ideas are coming more into the mainstream as a result of things like Twitter?

A: I think that the concept of mainstream is probably becoming archaic. We have the paradigm as very central to our society. We take it culturally for granted. The way things are going on the Internet, I’m starting to wonder if the paradigm is still valid.

Q: Relating to corporation money-making efforts on the Net.

A: For a quarter of a century, I’ve been saying we’re living in a world of exponential change driven by emergent technologies. That was the cyberpunk chorus… it’s starting to look like it’s finally happening big time.

Q: Relating to cultural artifacts like Lost.

A: Generally we don’t know what we were doing with something until we stop doing it.

In the chat, Gibson talks about the importance of peripheral awareness, his filter on mainstream culture (which is in the ‘on’ position most of the time), political consensus (he thinks it may be history). He thinks Google has changed the “meaning of exposition.”