Vince McMahon shouldn’t tweet

Yes, WWE Chairman & CEO Vince McMahon himself almost certainly isn’t sending the messages we see in his Twitter timeline. The most generous read of the situation is that he’s directing other to send the various happy birthday and congratulatory tweets that come from his account. A more cynical one if that they’re generated by WWE’s marketing department and Vince isn’t even aware of the tweets.

That’s irrelevant to my point, which is that with Twitter being Twitter (and really, the internet being the internet) and given the malaise affecting all things WWE these days, the account should really go silent. Otherwise, we get situations like this, where “Vince” sends congratulations to business partner Dwayne Johnson for his lifetime achievement-type “Generation Award” from MTV:

And gets responses like:

And that doesn’t count all the people replying “A-E-DUB” or “That’s good shit” or with the devil Vince GIF from the “Muscle Man Dance” edition of Firefly FunHouse.

Now, I’ll provide my own counter-point, which is that there are a lot of positive responses to the tweet, many of which are aimed at The Rock. And the goal of the tweet is to promote WWE’s connection to Johnson & his brand, so letting fans on Twitter make jokes they were going to make anyway is a small price to pay.

But in an image-driven business and one where McMahon’s reputation is a selling point for investors and partners - providing an easy, public target for fans to possibly damage Vince’s brand seems like a bad idea. Just have one of WWE’s company accounts shout out Rocky’s Generation Award.

Otherwise, you’re giving a little bit more of a spotlight to sentiments like the above. Or worse...