Wendi Deng Is Teaching Rupert Murdoch How to Use Twitter
Joining her husband Rupert Murdoch, Wendi Deng Murdoch has recently started tweeting, too, mostly to do some Rupert Murdoch ground control.
.Update (01/03/2012 9:12 a.m.): Wendi Deng Murdoch's account is a fake, a News Corp. spokesperson told The Atlantic Wire in an email on Tuesday morning.
Original Post: Joining her husband Rupert Murdoch, Wendi Deng Murdoch has recently started tweeting, too, mostly to do some Rupert Murdoch ground control. Murdoch has already gotten into trouble since signing up as a verified @rupertmurdoch on December 31. Deng's first tweet came not too long after Murdoch's debut, appearing on January 1. "hello everyone. trying out twitter again now @rupertmurdoch is on it. showing him great way 2 communicate with people," she tweeted. And that's basically what she's done since then: taught Murdoch the do's and don'ts of Twitter.
Since starting his tweeting adventures, Murdoch already had a social media scandal, as we noted this morning. In short: He sent an offensive tweet, he then deleted said tweet, but not before people noticed, producing the anti-murdoch hashtag #murdochsdeletedtweets. Turns out, it was actually Deng that got Murdoch to delete the tweet in the first place, noticed Storyful's Felim McMahon.
She followed that up with one of her many Twitter lessons to her hubbie. "Explaining to @rupertmurdoch about being careful with humor on line. sometimes it comes out as rude!" she wrote. If not for Deng, Murdoch would have let the controversial tweet sit in his feed forever, open to many embarrassing retweets from his now over 65,000 followers. Sure, he already got himself a hashtag and lots of blogger attention, but at least the tweet no longer exists. At the time, due to her liberal exclamation point usage and lack of official Twitter verification, it was unclear if @Wendi_Deng was the real Wendi Deng. At this point, Twitter has given @Wendi_Deng the blue check mark of approval.
Internet humor isn't the only thing Deng has taught her husband in his few days on the service. She's started with the basics: Twitter theory, tweeting, retweeting and following other people -- he clearly hasn't figured out that last one yet, as he's only following five people (up from four this morning). But, it looks as though, Rupert has lessons for Deng as well, who kind of tweets like a tween, with all those smiley faces and exclamation points.
Yeah, Rupert, you wouldn't understand.