Small World Labs

In the last week a battle has been raging in the Twitterverse about the act of following someone on Twitter. The fight between two of the top ranked "twitterati" was sparked by a Valentine Day blog post on PragueBob's WebX. OH!. The post found here: http://budurl.com/xv8a focuses on Perry Belcher- who has over 41,862 followers on Twitter. His popularity, seemingly untarnished by the fact that he is a convicted felon, serving a suspended sentence of 10 years for marketing dubious herbal remedies.

PragueBob's post calls into question the ethics of following someone, shining the spotlight on those of us (myself included) that are amongst Belcher's list of followers. There are various camps in this battle; Belcher's ardent defenders, people who think he should be in prison, people who believe that following is an tacit endorsement of the person being followed, and those who think following is a passive act with no implication on the person/brand in question.

I fall into a gray area in this debate, as I do blindly follow people who follow me- choosing to vet them based on the content of their tweets. In this case I'm stuck: What do I do in the case of someone who puts out good content but whose personal brand is tarnished? Does my brand risk any exposure being associated (even if only by Twitter) with someone who pled guilty to a pretty awful charge?

The answer, for me, is to unfollow. In my opinion, social media relies on a sense relational vouching. I can say I like a person or the content that person presents but I can't distinguish who is followed for what reason. Some people look at who I follow and use that information as one of the factors in their decision to follow or not- cementing virtual thumbs up for the people I follow. In this case, I think that the risk to the brand outweighs the value of the content, especially since I have enough follow overlap that I see retweets of the best content he produces.

So I put the question out to you: What would you do in a case like this?