A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

‘Why?’ asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit.  The panda produces a badly-punctuated wildlife [...]]]> You’ve probably heard this grammar joke (this is the polite version):

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

‘Why?’ asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit.  The panda produces a badly-punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

‘Well, I’m a panda’, he says. ‘Look it up.’

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. ‘Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China.  Eats, shoots and leaves.’

Now, I’m a fan of grammatical pedantry generally, but the idea that a message can be so easily transformed by the slightest change is fascinating.  For example:

Let’s eat, Daddy!

Let’s eat Daddy!

For want of a comma, this childish entreaty for food becomes something far more sinister.

With this in mind, consider the impact of grammatical changes, truncations, translations and other modifications that happen every day on Twitter when someone “retweets” something you’ve written (if you’re on Twitter).   Generally, retweets are considered to be a good thing – you’ve written an article, you state that fact on Twitter, and the news is circulated around the online community.   However, outside of “pure” retweets, your message is changed in some way every time it is passed on.  This could be positive or negative – there could be no impact – but consider the potential lack of control over your original message.

Here are a couple of examples:

TheRickWilson: Good riddance to bad rubbish RT @LizMair: Laters, Tim Kaine!

MisSMarG3La: Im gonna have to disagree. RT @JMFW_: bacon and waffles > ..eggs

billiferlove: Freakn ridiculous!!!!!! RT @chargers: Chargers have signed Head Coach Norv Turner to a three-year contract extension.

Regardless of the original intent, a comment could add weight and colour to your message.  It is possible that @LizMair was bidding a cheerful “Good Day” to Tim Kaine.  For all we know, she is acquainted with Tim Kaine and drinks had been arranged for later in the day.  But with the addition of “Good riddance to bad rubbish”, one would assume that @LizMair’s message is the same as @TheRickWilson’s (which is possible, but can you be 100% sure if the only thing you are looking at is the above tweet?).
What if that was your message?  Perception of what you intended by what you wrote can easily be coloured.

Of course, this can be a source of tremendous promotion.

_artlover: Wow! RT @petapixel Cool nature shot – A roll cloud over Uruguay:http://j.mp/5GXCvA

Carly24Dani: I’d buy it RT @gossipteens: Taylor Swift Planning Her Autobiographyhttp://bit.ly/74NfYz

lilt82: Buy it RT @tifamusic: RT @soshifty: @tifamusic @ward21music Tifa’s new single “If I Could Fly” available on iTunes now: http://bit.ly/5Frlm6

The addition of a comment can make your message more persuasive.  If someone I follow closely on Twitter uses a word like “Wow” as a comment on a retweet, the likelihood that I will pay attention is increased.  In addition, the habit of trying to attribute a tweet to all previous retweeters can give the impression of reach in a message.

So, I decided to experiment.  Yesterday, Eric Peterson posted the following tweet on Twitter:

erictpeterson FREE PDF COPIES of Web Analytics Demystified and my KPI Book for EVERYONE: http://bit.ly/5AleMT #measure

Safe in the knowledge that this would probably get quite a bit of attention in the retweet department, I decided to try to stalk it through the Interweb to see how it would evolve as time progressed. I didn’t expect the message itself to change much, given the “free books for everyone” nature of the tweet, but I was interested in the potential for change and the impact of retweet habits.

Click to see full size

During the first hour following the tweet’s publication, the number of modified tweets quickly exceeded “pure” retweets (i.e. retweets without any change or addition of comment to the original).  In addition, the tweet swiftly lost its “#measure” hashtag, which is used by those in the analytics community to tag analytics-related tweets.  This was generally caused by the desire of retweeters to add comments to the message, for example “Download Now”, “downloading“, “Cool”, “Great contribution” etc.
While all of this positive reinforcement is wonderful, note that now there are less tagged instances of this tweet so those who simply monitor the tagged tweets stream could miss out.
Some of those who retweet without the hashtag may not have web analytics followers, so the message could stop there.

Within the first hour, the URL leading to the book download page also began to change.  This could be a problem if you tag your URLs on the fly for campaign data capture in a web analytics tool.  Twitter attribution is notoriously difficult given this particular tendency towards change.  Someone clicks on the URL you have provided but then does not include your campaign parameter when they re-introduce the URL into their promotional tweet.  Coupled with the loss of author-attribution (in this case, tweets without mention of @erictpeterson), this can also make the tweet tricky to manually track as it moves and changes.  Many “direct access / no referring URL” visits could be attributed to Twitter “travel” – this can be difficult to gauge and could theoretically play havoc with your online campaigns.

Within four hours, the #measure hashtag had all but disappeared from non-pure retweets and the rate of URL change increased.  The tweet began to appear in foreign languages (paraphrased, not translated), and further instances of tweets with completely changed text and no author attribution began to appear.
Within 24 hours, there was little sign of the original tweet.  The original message was sent in a new tweet with different text the next day, which can account for much of the disappearance, but bear in mind the potential implications.

Remember that each time you tweet, you are running the risk of playing Chinese Whispers and having your message distorted by each retweeter.  Do you know exactly where your tweets end up when you set them free?