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Yesterday Twitter suspended UK journalist Guy Adam’s account for tweeting negatively about NBC’s coverage of the Olympics, including tweeting an email address of the NBC executive in charge. Today we’ve learned that it was not NBC that initiated a complaint, but Twitter that took the surprising step of proactively informing NBC.

The assumption yesterday, unwritten but certainly thought, was that NBC had complained to Twitter. And that was bad enough, raising questions about freedom of speech and appropriate uses for Twitter, which has become a significant global communications utility, with 500 million registered users.

But today the Daily Telegraph revealed that actually, Twitter contacted NBC about the tweets, not vice versa. At least, according to a letter from NBC vice-president of communications Christopher McCloskey.

And that puts an entirely different complexion on things.

Up until now, Twitter has felt like something of a neutral party: If corporations or individuals complained about a tweet or an account, the company would investigate. And, if the terms of service had been violated or other violations found, Twitter would take action.

Source: John Koetsier

Guy Adams’ Twitter account: nothing to see here, move along folks

But it’s an entirely different matter to proactively be reviewing tweets and sending companies notifications about potential problems. Those are the actions of a publisher, not a communications utility. We’d expect to see that kind of move from a traditional movie or music industry organization, not our modern darling of geeky social news.

Bad form, Twitter. Seriously bad form.

It’s even worse when you consider that NBC and Twitter had a partnership to tell the story of London 2012 via tweets. That makes Twitter look like it has skin in this particular game … like the company was not a neutral party. Already some publications are stating quite openly that Twitter censored Adams because of the NBC partnership.

While that’s going too far based on the facts on-hand, one thing is for sure: This has really, really, really bad optics.

Suspending the journalist’s account was obviously — obviously! — a horrendously stupid idea. Anyone with even the smallest amount of media sense had to know that this would blow up. That Adams’ paper would publish about it. That the technology press would pick it up. That it would become a big story.

In fact, it’s the trending auto-complete on Google right now:

The smart way to deal with it was to not deal with it. The journalist in question, Guy Adams, would have continued to tweet, and most people would have continued to not notice.

But now it’s a big story, and Twitter has huge egg on its face.

Perhaps there’s a reason Twitter has lost multiple communications directors in record time.

Image credit: Nito/ShutterStock

Filed under: media, social, VentureBeat

The interwebs are all a flutter over how a critic of NBC’s Olympic coverage had his Twitter account suspended after tweeting the email address of the executive in charge of that coverage. It was private, said Twitter. Public to anyone with Google, said journalist Guy Adams, whose account was…



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An executive at Blizzard, the developer of hit games like “World of Warcraft” and “Diablo III,” has joined in to deride Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 operating system.

When asked whether Apple’s new Passbook app for iOS 6 hints at the company’s larger strategy for deploying a digital wallet infrastructure, chief executive Tim Cook described the new app as “a very key feature” but said he “wouldn’t want to comment specifically on that point.”

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said Tuesday he believes that if his company continues to strive to make the best smartphone in the world, carriers will remain motivated to provide the iPhone to their customers.

Mark Sloan gaat Anomaly Amsterdam leiden samen met Hazelle Klønhammer.

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We are pleased to introduce the new Social Media Club Board of Directors and Executive Committee for 2012/13.  The newly expanded Board has increased to 11 members and they are enthusiastic to continue with the progress from the past year. We received a healthy number of applicants applying for seats, and after much review and discussion, I am pleased to announce the new members for the coming year: 

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Loggly, a startup helping companies like Intuit, Airbnb, and BBC track their application logs, just announced that it has raised $5.7 million in new funding.

The company has new executives too — new CEO Charlie Oppenheimer (former CEO of Digital Fountain and Aptiva, and most recently Executive in Residence at Loggly’s new investor Matrix Partners) and new CTO and Vice President of Engineering Jim Nisbet (former CTO at RSA, Tablus, and DataTools). Oppenheimer tells me that even though he’s being officially announced as new CEO today, he’s actually been on the job for about three months.

Loggly’s founding team came from IT search engine Splunk, and it aimed to provide a fun (yes, really) approach to tracking server activity. Oppenheimer says Loggly allows companies to take a close look at individual user sessions to see where things might be going wrong, and also to answer the more general questions of “What’s going on?” and “How are we doing?” by looking at a variety of different graphs, for example comparing an app’s performance the week after new code was added with the performance the week before. By receiving this data as a web service, Loggly customers don’t have to buy servers and pay engineers to keep the system up. The company is now serving more than 2,500 customers, Oppenheimer says.

As for why Loggly needed new executives, Oppenheimer praises the founding team, calling founding CEO Kord Campbell “a very creative guy,” but he says that as the company is growing, it was time for someone more seasoned at the top.

“It happens all the time,” Oppenheimer says.

Still, he doesn’t want Loggly to lose its sense of fun, as exemplified by its beaver mascot. The beaver will stick around, though Oppenheimer says he may start looking a little more “smart and trustworthy and strong” and a little less like he “missed a day at a 12-step program.”

“How many cloud-based companies have you seen with blue-and-white websites?” Oppenheimer says, later adding, “It’s so rare that you can get that kind of fun, emotional connection with your customers, and if you’ve got it, you’ve got to develop it, nurture it. We ain’t going blue-and-white.”

The new funding was an extension of the $4.2 million Series A that the company raised two years ago. The money comes from Matrix and previous investors Trinity Ventures and True Ventures.

There are many American corporate traditions that are being swept aside by the sea-change of social media. One of those traditions is the lengthy company apology process after a company makes an error that has people up in arms. Companies would once invite the legal team, the PR team, an Executive or two, the marketing team and the offending product team to have a series of round table pow-wows about what messaging and forum to use to apologize publicly. The worst part was that after all that work, often the message still ended up too corporate and ineffectual.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Earlier this afternoon, Yahoo announced that it had appointed Marissa Mayer as its next President and CEO. The company is undoubtedly hoping that Mayer, who is Yahoo’s third chief executive in under one year, can help recapture some of the search engine’s lost market share. Since the majority of industry analysts and insiders were predicting [...]