Whose tweet is it anyway !!!

Recently, tweet is becoming a big craze amongst many marketers. Marketers are actively building twittable stories as a part of their overall marketing plan, almost like the good old storyboards that we took to the clients for approvals before shooting a television commercial. Infact Twitting is like a half-brother to Facebook and a very potent tool for first hand honest customer research, testing and dip test.

Mark Cuban posted a note on his blog enquiring if Tweets are copyrighted. My simple answer to that is 'NO'. The web world is all about providing exposure, dissemination and there is no chance for control. Those of you who are aware, two years ago when someone had posted the secret encrypted code on Digg that was used to unlock copyrighted DVDs of major labels, overnight, that Digg post's rank rose to the top spot on its homepage. Users were hitting the Digg homepage like swarms of bees. Sensing the impending danger Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg had to immediately put the post on the block and pulled it down from Digg to protect his company from a certain law suit. That act created so much of an uproar that Digg was neck deep in negative comments from it's most loyal and trusted followers. Further the damage was so wide spread that before Kevin could bring the post down, the encrypted code had already multiplied across the World Wide Web. Who on earth would have thought about that impact ! It wasn’t even Digg’s fault. Kevin had no choice but to reinstate the post the very next day. Then he sat down to write a famous blog (see link below) that underlined the fact that there is no such thing as copyrighted content on WWW, no matter how much time, energy and resources legal stalwarts and CEO of corporations spend to craft one to protect themselves or / from their customers.

We have never bothered to remember the name of the person who first posted the encrypted code on Digg. Neither did he get the post copyrighted nor is he earning dollars today on the impact it had. But what we remember is only the BIG bloodbath, that followed thereafter. Surely, there is no copyrighted content or post on the WWW.

Marketers, while Tweets are your best friends, it can be your worst enemy too. Exercise caution while you build a Twittable story for your brand or organization. Ensure you have covered your a** and have an exit plan or plan B in place as well, that can be implemented smoothly and quickly to protect your interests.

Kevin's blog post after the bloodbath - http://blog.digg.com/?p=74