There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who tweet… and those who think twitter is for the birds.
Every time a tweeter twits, an angel gets his wings.
But even among those of us who know the joys of conversing in 140-character blips, there is often dissent. Because you can’t get a group of people — let alone a couple million of them — in one place without fingers being pointed and accusations of bad behavior flying. Which of course leads us to today’s quiz question: How rude are you… as a tweeter?
As always, remember, the key to getting an accurate response is to be honest in answering… no matter how much it hurts!
"This could be problematic."
1. You’ve just installed tweetdeck on you office computer and love the sound it makes to signal you’ve received tweets. Several people in the office, however, are starting to look annoyed. Do you…
A) … join them in looking about, as if to say, “Gee, where is that sound coming from?”
B) … let it be known that you are a secret agent monitoring submarine activity off the coast.
C) … don headphones so as to keep the cool sound and your job.
2) Woo-hoo! You’ve just garnered you 500th follower! Do you…
A) … send out a tweet announcing this fact, as you have every significant twitterstone, including your first, 10th, 20th, 25th and so on follower.
B) … announce that your world will be sufficiently rocked and your life complete when you reach 1,000 followers.
C) … celebrate privately, acknowledging that nobody else in the twitterverse cares.
3) You send out hundreds of tweets a day. Are they…
A) … all promoting your business, blog or website?
B) … announcements of bowel movements?
C) … a mix of self-promotion, conversational snippets and retweets?
4) When you pick up new followers, do you…
A) … automatically send out a direct message which attempts to sell something?
B) … automatically send out an impersonal direct message?
C) … send a personal direct message or converse with them via the twitterstream?
5) You have achieved your goal of amassing thousands of followers. Do you…
A) … ignore responses to your tweets and follow almost none of those following you?
B) … ignore responses to your tweets but follow everyone who is following you?
C) … jump into the twitterstream whenever possible and converse with a wide variety of followers?
6) In your opinion, retweeting is…
A) … something other people should do with your stuff.
B) … a necessary evil in the tradition of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”
C) … something you do gladly and often.
7) Assuming you have followers whom you know nothing about — including age — when it comes to using adult language, would your tweets…
A) … make Tony Soprano blush, but concede you’re wildly creative with the compound-adjectives?
B) … make your mom blush, but admit she’s heard worse.
C) … make a Disney heroine blush, but that’s about it.
8) When it comes to PDTs (public displays of twittering), I draw the line at…
A) … tweeting when having sex. Just about anything else is fair game!
B) … tweeting when someone is giving a presentation.
C) … tweeting when it takes away from my interacting with people I’m with.
9) If someone sends out a tweet that offends me, my reaction is to…
A) … blast them via a public tweet.
B) … blast them in a direct message.
C) … decide between letting it go and opting not to follow the person any longer.
9) If asked, fellow tweeters would probably refer to me as a…
A) … twitter whore, looking to sell my wares to anyone who’ll buy ‘em.
B) … twitter pimp, looking to have others do the work so I can reap the reward.
C) … twitterbater, looking to please myself and have a good time in the process.
So how rude are you as a twitter user? Let’s just say if the majority of your honest answers required your selecting “A”, there’s a pretty good chance a lot of your followers are either “gatherers” who’ll take anyone and everyone or fellow type-A’s. If you found yourself selecting B fairly often, you’re what we might call a borderline twitterality. And if you were inexplicibly drawn to the C’s, you’ll no doubt be wildly popular among the twitteratti… at least until the next big thing in social networking comes along.
