I stopped by this Advertising Age post this morning, “Eek! How to React When You’ve Been Slammed on Twitter And How I Saved Myself from Looking Like A Clown”; it was the catchy headline that drew me in but it was subsequent curiosity that kept me reading.  The author is Freddie Laker:

Freddie Laker is the director of digital strategy at Sapient. He has also founded the Society of Digital Agencies, a collective of notable digital agencies focused on thought leadership and positive industry change and blogs at www.takemetoyourleader.com.

Freddie Laker tells this story (from the AA post):

Pretty much any way you look at it, there’s not a lot of upside to being called a clown. So imagine my feelings when my PR firm sent me this post they found on Twitter about my company’s recent attendance at an Adobe trade show:

“I thought Sapient was a mgmt consulting co? They’re the booth next to us at Adobe Max and they’re complete clowns” —Message posted on Twitter by [name withheld], November 19, 2008

What caught my eye was [name withheld].  Who was this [name withheld]?

My human curiosity got the better of me, so I continued reading.

Freddie goes on to dicuss his dilemma about how to deal with [name withheld], cycling through human emotions that are predictable for anyone spending time online, then resolves in his mind two things (emphasis mine):

1) The tweet was actually written by a reporter who doesn’t cover the interactive space so his opinion in regard to our status as clowns (to which he’s entitled) is largely irrelevant.

2) For now it (this article notwithstanding) isn’t appearing on any searches I can find and is having minimum impact on our businesses reputation.

So for Freddie, [name withheld] is irrelevant and lost.  Except that he’s not, and neither is his tweet.

A simple search reveals that [name withheld] is mjsay, also known as Matt Asay, “The Open Road” writer for CNET and according to his profile:

Matt Asay is general manager of the Americas and vice president of business development at Alfresco, and has nearly a decade of operational experience with commercial open source and regularly speaks and publishes on open-source business strategy. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.

Disclosure: Matt Asay is an employee with Alfresco, an open-source software vendor. He is the founder of the Open Source Business Conference and continues to serve as its program chair. He serves on the advisory boards of the following open-source companies: MuleSource, SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Loopfuse, Openbravo, Volantis, rSmart, MindTouch, Specifix, and Bungee Labs. He has an equity interest in these companies. He is an informal advisor to Microsoft, Jumpbox, and other companies with no equity or other financial interest. He is an advisor to Sage Leadership with no financial or equity interest in the organization.

He formally served on the board of the Open Source Initiative. He was also an employee of Novell and before that Lineo and Mitsui. He left each company on good terms, and holds no financial interest in any of these.

He’s a Mac fanatic and hates Windows. Matt also admits to a bias against 20th-century proprietary-software models. Sorry.

I’d say Freddie’s conclusions are both at risk. I read the rest of that post with a grain of salt, and a slice of good bread.

If you eat at the social media table with the big kids, don’t forget that we all leave bread crumbs, no matter how neat and [name withheld] you try to be.