Sheamus from Twittercism, argubly the best Twitter blog around at the moment, wrote a post yesterday about his public debate on Twitter with Aaron Wall from SEOBook entitled ‘Twitter Is A Public Forum, So Be Mindful How You Quote Me‘.

It started 2 days ago when Sheamus noticed that the pop up for SEOBook’s ‘7 Days To Success’ course would still come up on his screen, even though he had clicked the option to not see it again. So he contacted Aaron with this request :

Aaron, polite request: can you take a look at the ‘don’t ask me again’ part of the pop-up on SEO Book? It *always* asks again.

The conversation continued with the following.

Aaron replied :

if I could replicate the problem I might spend a bit of resources on fixing it, but it works for me. are you clearing cookies?

Sheamus said :

I clear regularly, yes. It doesn’t bother me as much but I link to your site a bit on here, and folks complain at *me*.

Aaron then replied with a statement which suprised me a little. He said :

tell them not to be cheap asses or whiners. Either I effectively market my site, or I stop working on it 80+ hours a week.

I was really surprised by this comment. As regular BloggingTips readers know, I’m not a fan of these kind of pop ups myself though I do understand that this type of promotional method is effective and can increase sign ups by a good percentage. However, I don’t like the implication that anyone who complains about a pop up is a whiner, nor are they a cheap ass just because they are not interested in the product being promoted.

In his post Sheamus rightly points out that he wasn’t complaining about the pop up, he was simply letting Aaron know that the option to not see the pop up again was not working.

Ciaran Norris joined in the debate and replied with the following :

# Wow. Been taking lessons in customer service from big brands? Cheap asses & whiners? Really?

# of course you can market your site how you like, but people can also say if they find pop-ups annoying.

# maybe you should think about them as non-customers

Aaron replied about 20 minutes or so later with the following tweets :

# I get about 10 product support requests daily from people who never have intent on spending a cent with me.

# the same people whine about pop ups (or any profitable marketing strategy).

# I probably wasted millions of dollars catering to people who never had any intent of being a customer.

# those who find marketing by giving away free great information a turn off are generally pretty useless

# particularly when it takes less effort for them to click the “don’t show” link than it does for them to bitch & whine

# not really. because most non-customers (for me anyhow) probably think the information is too advanced.

# those who bitch about a pop up w a free offer *for real potential customers* were never going to be customers. just azzwholez

Having public debates via Twitter

Before I proceed, I just want to point out that I don’t Aaron Wall personally. I think some of the tweets above might give the wrong impression of him but from what I have read, he’s a nice guy.

You need to remember that it’s very easy to get caught up in a heated discussion and say something which, in hindsight, was probably not the best thing to say. Over the years I did this several times on forums I ran and have had to then apologise to people and clarify what I meant. Things can also be taken out of context easily online too.

To his credit, Aaron did not backtrack and remove his tweets and he explained his view about the whole thing in his post ‘But Who’s Opinion Matters?‘ and replied at Twittercism too (for the record, I actually agree with a lot of what he says in his post).

For me this whole debate has highlighted how public Twitter really is (Sure you can protect your updates though that’s not something I’d like to do). Because of the interactions we make with other people through Twitter it is very easy to forget that your tweets are public, that everyone can see what you are writing. It’s also easy to misintepret what is being said because we may only see half of a conversation.

In this situation I think Aaron Wall did not paint himself in a good light, particularly by saying that those who complain about pop ups but who have no intention of signing up to his course are ‘azzwholez’. Again, it’s worth remembering that things can be said in the heat of the moment and it is easy to misintepret or overexaggerate a situation.

All of this raises somes questions :

• Should we be having heated debates through Twitter?
• What kind of replies should be sent privately via a direct message instead of posted publicly?
• Should strong views and personal opinions be tweeted at all?

Twitter is a great way to build your online repuation however reputations can be destroyed much quicker than they are built and theres always a chance of of doing that if you get involved in a heated debate online. In this sitation I don’t think Aaron has hurt his reputation though it does remind us all how public Twitter is and how negative Tweets can affect our online persona.

Have you ever tweeted something you later regretted or said something personal which should have been posted privately?

I’d love to hear your opinion on having debates through Twitter