There was a lot of furore this weekend when in a moment of doubt and introspection Stephen Fry self proclaimed "British Actor, Writer, Lord of Dance, Prince of Swimwear & Blogger" threatened to walk away from Twitter because of "aggression and unkindness". this was followed by Katie Price who broke down in no-more-than-140-character sections, telling her "haters" to just attack her and get it off their chest (her words).
It seems that now that Twitter has reached the mainstream it is the must use method of communication for a "celebrity" to stay in the public eye but they are all unprepared to deal with the backlash which Mr Fry's 938k followers exacted on him.
The same principle is true for brands - few have found a useful way to use Twitter a good example being Habitat's fateful foray and some have made a huge success of it such as Zappos with their 1.5m followers they have successfully used social networks such as Twitter to build a very successful business.
We have recently completed a project for one of our Clients that involved an analysis of a number of Twitter based campaigns including T Mobile, Walkers, Dell and Skittles and the overriding conclusion was that people are pretty fickle - the most successful way to build followers was a prize draw or competition - indeed Moonfruit came top where by simply giving away 10 laptops and asking people to mention #moonfruit they generated 55k Tweets and a buzz of up 15k mentions per day, it also accounted for a significant sales boost.
I guess the challenge for brands is how they can grab hold of the zeitgeist and integrate themselves in a productive and intrusive way into the conversation - right now the biggest topic is unseen prequels where "People are tweeting made-up titles for nonexistent prequels to different movies" - there are approx 1,000 tweets per minute right now ranging from "Batman and Robin The Curious Years" to "The Devil Wears Primark" - I wonder how a brand like can integrate itself into this - prize for the most innovative / make the actual movie ?