Social media proponents sometimes think everyone has active accounts on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
But often, fake accounts make it hard to determine whether account holders and photos are genuine.
Twitter has a process where it verifies the identity of public figures, but many well-known politicians and business leaders cannot be bothered going through the process.
That’s why neither James Moore, who is the regional minister for Metro Vancouver, nor former B.C. premier Ujjal Dosanjh have gone through the official Twitter verification process to prove their accounts are bona fide. Those politicians’ tweets, however, make clear they are who they say they are. The account for the senior cabinet minister in charge of B.C., Stockwell Day, is less clear.
Day’s face is displayed, but the account has no tweets.
“I don’t tweet, actually. It looks like I have the account but I don’t,” Day told Business in Vancouver. “On Facebook too. Somebody has a Facebook account up for me. I don’t know who it is. We monitor [it] to make sure that there’s nothing that’s misleading or anything that is written on it.”
Day says he is too busy to tweet – a sentiment many business leaders share.
London Drugs’ marketing team is quick to respond to any positive or negative tweets about the company.
But, ask the 69-store retail chain’s president, Wynne Powell, why he doesn’t personally tweet and he’ll give an answer many business owners can relate to.
“I work 12 to 14 hours a day now and I would not do a good job of sitting down and tweeting. Yesterday, I had 238 emails. You can only do so much,” said Powell, who has visited Twitter to understand what the site is all about.
He said that in order to be respectful of people who use Twitter as a communication tool, he has chosen not to have an account. He does not want people to send him tweets and expect a response.
“People wouldn’t understand and they would just think that this guy doesn’t care. That wouldn’t be true.”