A Glimpse of Murdoch Unbound

As American business has become more and more media savvy, its leaders have appeared in media less and less. Business reporters have to work their way past background conversations with underlings, written statements that state nothing, and that increasingly hardy perennial: the “no comment.” The modern chief executive lives behind a wall of communications operatives, many of whom ladle out slop meant to obscure rather than reveal.

But, Twitter has the potential to cut past all that clutter. Given its ubiquity, there’s a chance to get a glimpse into the thinking of otherwise unapproachable executives, and sometimes even have a real dialogue with them. No one can be forced to use Twitter, but some people, even captains of industry, cannot resist.

That number now includes Rupert Murdoch, the 80-year-old chief executive of News Corporation. When Mr. Murdoch began posting to Twitter at the end of last year, it seemed too good to be true: Rupert unbound. A nightmare, perhaps, from a public relations perspective: a highly opinionated executive pushing the button on messages, no minders or layers involved, whenever he felt like it. But for the rest of us, it has been a rare look beyond the spectral image. It’s almost cute. So, has Mr. Murdoch, who reportedly does not use personal computers, become a cautionary tale about the perils of social media engagement?

Not so far. Mr. Murdoch has a reputation — give or take his appearance before the British Parliament in the hacking investigation — for saying what is on his mind, and Twitter has been no exception. He has gone on a rant about pirated content, excoriated Google and President Obama for not supporting antipiracy efforts, and let his political preferences — take that, Andrew Cuomo — show in unalloyed ways. (He nicely predicted Rick Santorum’s strong showing in Iowa as well.)

Of course, with Twitter being a social and intimate platform, he has gotten knocked around for being a bore and prone to gaffes and, most oddly, has been accused of not being the person behind the account, which has been marked as “verified” by Twitter. “It’s obvious that Rupert Murdoch is not actually behind these tweets,” sniffed a writer for PC Magazine.

It is more obvious to anyone who has covered Mr. Murdoch that he is indeed the one putting his thumbs to an iPad and posting to the world. His posts are devoid of nuance, partisan in the extreme and prone to crankiness, all consistent with the Rupert Murdoch we have come to know.

In the middle of January, when it became clear that the ill-conceived legislation to prevent piracy was going nowhere, his anguish and anger squirted out in 140-character bursts, day after day, leaving little doubt about whose ox was being gored.

He took on the president: “So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery.”

He took on Google: “Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying.”

And he took on movie stars: “On SOPA, where are all big film stars with many millions to lose?”

He even responded to pushback from users who suggested that people who run companies that hack phones should not give lectures about piracy:

“No excuses for phone hacking. No argument. No excuses either for copyright stealing, but plenty of ignorant argument!”

And just in case we still weren’t sure these posts were the unadorned handiwork of somebody not used to typing or computing, there was this gem:

“Seems like universal anger with Optus from all sorts of normal supporters. Maybe backing pirates a rare miscalculation by friend Axelrod.”

He meant “Potus” — for president of the United States — and blamed the autocorrect function on his iPad for the goof, but the rest of the message was vintage Murdoch. That post and its siblings have ignored the huge wave of protests from consumers, reductively defined the debate as being about the morality of theft, and have tried to intimidate both enemies and timid allies.

He has other pet causes, and in that vein, he recently did a drive-by on Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York. On the day of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s state of the city address, Mr. Murdoch praised the mayor’s “bold teacher proposals” then asked, “How will chicken Cuomo respond?” Chicken-baiting politicians is not what you’d expect from a man who runs a company with a market capitalization of almost $50 billion, but it is in line with the run-and-gun spirit of Twitter.

Mr. Murdoch is enormously successful, has a compliant board and runs a company with the kind of profits that allow him to live a life beyond consequence. Who is going to tell him that expressing his views on Twitter is not a good idea? Besides, it is a fine opportunity for the rest of us to hear what’s on the mind of a man who controls vast swaths of the global conversation.

Other executives have taken to Twitter with mixed results. Martha Stewart uses it to shill the brand relentlessly, with the occasional reminder of just how fabulous her life is.Richard Branson yields to no one when it comes to self-promotion, but mixes it up with observation and the occasional wisecrack. Generally, the more techie the company, the more likely the chief executive will know what he is doing on Twitter. Tony Hsieh, the head of Zappos.com, is a state-of-the-art communicator on the site, combining company updates with, say, a really cool video of starlings flocking.

The rules of effective tweeting for business leaders are no different from the ones for us mere mortals who want to both express ourselves and remain employed: Don’t be boring, don’t curse, and for heaven’s sake, don’t always be shouting about how some junior executive is really knocking it dead. Being interesting is the key to going viral, and on that score, I’d give Mr. Murdoch decent marks.

Without so much as a single call to a flack, I’ve learned that he claims to have paid all his taxes in New York State and New York City, that he thinks both parties have sold out to Wall Street via the carried-interest loophole, and that his young daughters are driving him nuts with a request for yet another dog. Oh, and that he and I share a belief that the price of popcorn in movie theaters is one of the most important scandals in Western civilization.

Mr. Murdoch may not know much about computers, but he has an intuitive understanding of how Twitter is supposed to work. By mixing the personal and political, propaganda and plain old rants, he is serving his interests and the interests of his company. He will no doubt make some missteps — two days after he started tweeting, he caused an uproar when he called Britain a “broke country” — but in general, his embrace of social media has gone well. (It will be interesting to see if Mr. Murdoch does some Twitter spinning the next time News Corporation hits a rough patch in the hacking scandal.)

After a month of reading Mr. Murdoch’s posts, I have to say there’s something refreshing about the directness of the medium and, yes, the man using it.

He’s even managed to express some humility amid the bravado. “Many questions and jokes about My Space. simple answer — we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons.” Of course, Twitter is a megaphone that goes both ways, so Mr. Murdoch has been described as old, stupid and in other terms that can’t be rendered here. A man of notoriously thick skin, he has still seemed surprised by some of the vitriol.

“Why can’t we have sensible tweets,” he wrote. “You’re mainly just crazy and fun to read. No loss of sleep here.”

Mr. Murdoch’s desire to be seen as a paragon of civility in any media realm, old or new, is rich. But give him credit for engaging in the world we all now live in and for not losing sleep over what pops out.

Fuente: the New York Times