In many ways, #Twitter is a joy, because it is potentially very democratising, allowing anyone to have a dominant presence on it, whether he or she be a GDL student, a member of the House of Lords, or a University Professor. However, it can be so easy to equate the number of followers on Twitter with quality. Legal tweeps in the UK don’t approach the heights of this notorious international tweep

Or maybe

Or maybe

Or maybe

It would in fact be dead easy to give the appearance of a large number of followers by a lack of blocking of spambots.

The starting point must be that the community of #legaltweeps in the UK constitutes a broach church. There are reliable #legaltweeps who are often ‘first’ with the breaking legal news, and who can offer a quick informed, detailed, well-evidenced commentary.

Unfortunately, some #legaltweeps, perhaps through having a high follower number, demonstrate personality traits akin to ‘narcissistic leaders’. The anthropologist Michael Maccoby in the Harvard Business Review offered this observation:

“Such love of the limelight often stems from what Freud called a narcissistic personality. Narcissists are good for companies in extraordinary times, those that need people with the passion and daring to take them in new directions. But narcissists can also lead companies into disaster by refusing to listen to the advice and warnings of their managers. It’s not always true, as Andy Grove famously put it, that only the paranoid survive. Most business advice is focused on the more analytic personality that Freud labeled obsessive. But recommendations about creating teamwork and being more receptive to subordinates will not resonate with narcissists. They didn’t get where they are by listening to others, so why should they listen to anyone when they’re at the top of their game?”

Interestingly Maccoby offers advice for such individuals, which presumably include narcissistic #legaltweeps:

“Narcissists who want to overcome the limits of their personalities must work as hard at that as they do at business success. One solution is to find a trusted sidekick, who can point out the operational requirements of the narcissistic leader’s often overly grandiose vision and keep him rooted in reality. Another is to take a leap of faith and go into psychoanalysis, which can give these leaders the tools to overcome their sometimes fatal character flaws.” 

So, there you have it, it would be sensible for such tweeps to have a reliable ‘sidekick’. How might you spot such behaviour in the first place? Here’s part of the timeline of @iamsuperbreally:

Keeping such tweets in view of the public in timeline is a trick well known to marketers. Retweeting praise for you is a phenomenon known as ‘shilling‘ in marketing, for example:

‘Celebrity endorsements‘ are one way of promoting your product, and if you can display a demand for what you’re writing about, in the form of a complimentary tweet, that’s all well-and-good.  It is clear to me and some of my friends I’ve spoken to at #tweetups that some #legaltweeps fancy themselves as a ‘gatekeeper’ for budding other tweeps, in a sort of ‘I can make or break their career’ way.

For encouraging ‘leadership following’, the ‘cultural web‘ has long provided that the judicious use of prizes can be used to harness a semblance of peer respect and recognition, and popularity, for example:

In this example, @iamsuperbreally apparently has made it onto an exclusive list of well-recognised #legaltweeps, and it appears that @iamsuperbreally doesn’t mind showing off in public that he or she even knows the judge (@creep4) socially!

Some #legaltweeps are genuinely expert, however, so here is @iamsuperbreally offering a comment on a study published by the Bar Standards Board. Twitter can cater for such a heterogeneity of tweets.

However, such a timeline can easily degenerate into a splurge of self-glorification, akin to this shown by @iamsuperbreally earlier today:

A full analysis of how legal #tweeps interact involves ‘social network’ theory, described briefly in Wikipedia as follows:

A social network is a social structure made up of a set of actors (such as individuals or organizations) and the dyadic ties between these actors (such as relationships, connections, or interactions). A social network perspective is employed to model the structure of a social group, how this structure influences other variables, or how structures change over time.^[1] 

Particularly interesting is here how certain #tweeps act as ‘lead users’ in the community, and how tweets may ‘diffuse’ across the whole network depending on, for example, popularity of certain individuals within the network and the rate of re-tweeting. Within that network, some tweeps can not only serve to promote the tweets of others (‘promoters’), but can try to dampen as best they can the tweeting activities of others (‘inhibitors’). This may be to protect ‘vested interests’, or to protect a microcosm of tweeting activity, or just purely accidental.