Upping the ante on social media

As young as he is, Noah knows the power of social media and how it drives his reputation. But perhaps he has forgotten that in cyber space his reputation is in the hands of untrained, uncensored, anonymous third parties who can spread negative, damning content as quickly as he can enhance his profile.

He is a comedian, and a really good one at that, so the volume and breadth of data about Trevor out there is staggering. Critical to his reputation, however, is that he has left a trail which never forgets and is open to the whole wide world - a world of instant gratification where people react before thinking.

And a world where the context of the tweet at the time is lost and unrecorded - posing the risk of historical data mining being easily misconstrued.

While twitter can raise your profile to new heights it can take you way under in nanoseconds. While the world and especially South Africa celebrates our protégé with:

Some old tweets are being dug up and are destined to haunt him:

Perhaps we should start a #whatshouldtrevordo? Essentially there is not much he can do in terms of the old tweets - they are not erasable.

Our advice: keep using social media to boost your own profile, but beware of the context they're posted in; that tonality is easily misinterpreted in text (not least in less than 140 characters); and that the elimination of those two is a critical risk to your reputational legacy when sarcasm and satire are your primary tools as a comedian.

Bottom line: social posts in writing are "publication in concrete" on a platform that never goes away. Be careful what you tweet - they could come back to bite you.