Former employee's account does not constitute official customer list
You know the times are changing when a company believes that its Twitter followers should be treated like a customer list. The online social network service got its start almost six years ago, and is now being manipulated by companies that want more money.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Maria-Elena James ruled on Monday that the lawsuit by South Carolina company PhoneDog against former employee Noah Kravitz could go forward. PhoneDog, a review website for mobile devices, sued Kravitz in July with the claim that after Kravitz resigned from the company he changed his Twitter name from @PhoneDog-Noah to @noahkravitz, yet kept his 17,000 followers. PhoneDog claims that Kravitz should pay $2.50 per Twitter follower per month for eight months, a total of $340,000, because the followers are similar to a customer list. The company wants compensation for the loss of their "customers" and for the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Kravitz's name change cost them in lost business.
While these claims sound exaggerated, it is really not that hard to imagine a company losing money over social network followers. Look at Facebook. It began in 2004 and now has more than 800 million active users. That's more than double the population of the United States. There are "pages" for everything you can imagine, pages that are often company-generated for the purposes of advertising. The same is becoming true for Twitter, and while Twitter is not as big as Facebook, it is climbing in members and is becoming more appealing for businesses. Its layout is easier to use and more flexible than Facebook's, allowing businesses to increase their advertising even more. There is no denying that Twitter will become an even stronger tool for advertisers in the years to come.
However, Twitter followers should not be classified as a legitimate customer list. They could be classified as an informal customer list, but unless PhoneDog is a business solely based on Twitter — which it is not — then it cannot claim that Kravitz stole its customers.
Kravitz should win this case, because what is at stake in this dispute is the difference between a customer and a follower. A customer can be classified as a person that buys either goods or services from a business, while a follower is an adherent of a certain person, cause or activity. Twitter followers should not be treated as a customer list, because the two words express two different qualities. True customers interact with a business through multiple means outside of Twitter, whereas followers simply keep track of announcements.
Despite all this, Kravitz could have avoided the issue by making it perfectly clear to his followers that he no longer represented PhoneDog. For all the students that are looking into a job that involves technology, specifically social networking, be careful to keep the company in mind and act professionally when handling Twitter. Your followers might change from a close resource into a career liability.