NY Gov’s Huge Twitter Mistake
By Lauren Dugan
Lesson: always link to your real Twitter account from your official website, politicians. Actually, that goes for everyone. And this lesson comes courtesy of New York’s new Governor, Andrew Cuomo, who had to learn it the hard way when he officially launched his website yesterday.
Cuomo’s official website had everything a modern-day politician could dream of: a slick layout, multimedia, and a solid social media area. He had a Flickr stream, asked you to become a fan on Facebook and even friend his Facebook account. And, of course, he linked to a Twitter account, @NYGovernor.
However, all was not what it seems when users clicked to that Twitter profile yesterday.
It turns out that it led to a fake account set up by Nicholas M. Fahrenkopf, who explained how he stumbled onto his 15 minutes of fame to the New York Times. He noticed that the link on the Governor’s official webpage pointed to a non-existing account, so “I signed up, grabbed some images from the Web site and started following people,” he wrote in an email.