Adrian Peterson Goes On Retweet Binge, Delighting And Angering Twitter Followers

It’s still a couple days till camp starts and Adrian Peterson is obviously feeling antsy. This could explain why he spent most of Friday afternoon taking requests for retweets from his Twitter followers and pretty much filling every request. Every. Single. Stinking. Request. For a short period of time it actually seemed like Peterson had totally taken over Twitter, bringing the normal flow of irresponsible NFL free agent speculation to a screeching halt.

Now, some of you are probably asking what the big deal is about this. Isn’t Adrian just showing love for his fans? Isn’t that kind of sweet? Yes I suppose. However, in doing so, Peterson broke one of the biggest of Twitter’s unwritten rules. This rule states, “Do not flood your followers’ timelines with stupid tweets, or they will get annoyed.” Peterson’s retweeting binge, lovely as the motivations behind it may have been, basically annihilated this rule, and ticked off more than one of his tweeps.

So excessive was Peterson’s retweet blitz that even the high-and-mighty mainstream media took note. Darren Rovell tweeted, “Sure, AP made 80 people happy by RT’ing them. But I guarantee he ticked off 90% of his followers. Just not the best use of Twitter.”

Some Twitter cynics, like Viking Age reader @MNVikingsGuy, accused Peterson of being led into this questionable social media approach by his handlers. “Someone must have just had a recent meeting with his PR/Marketing team —–> @AdrianPeterson,” quipped the Twitter gadfly.

If you want to get even more cynical than that, you could even believe Peterson is doing this as part of an overall PR strategy meant to soften the blow of the hold out he is planning to undertake starting Sunday. This morning I raised the possibility that Peterson could hold out in spite of his promises not to, and this latest episode hasn’t done anything to allay my fears. I think there’s a good chance a contract showdown between the Vikings and AD could be on the horizon, and it will not be pretty.

2011 season, you are already going down the tubes.

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