To be fair to Chernin, he's a board member, not a leadership executive. Most Twitter employees will never meet him and many may not even know who he is (or the other board members). Smaller companies have a board that's much closer to the employees, where it's not uncommon for senior employees to be in frequent contact with individual board members for advice. Larger companies will have boards that are far more diverse and typically far from the product. For example, Apple has the Chairman of Avon and the former Chairman/CEO of Northrop Grumman.
It's a small embarrassment to Chernin to bobble his first Tweet. The more interesting story is that he's a Hollywood deal maker, and that's more reflective of Twitter's aspirations. While he may have said some stuff about MySpace when he was at News Corp, he's really a media entertainment guy.
Not only that, but it's also a bit of a stretch to draw any connection between NewsCorp's stewardship of MySpace and Twitter's developer strategy. There is no real connection there.
Chernin is not going to be leading or planning developer-relations strategies for the platform. Most likely, to your point, he's going to be there to develop content and media partnerships. He's one of the most powerful and connected people in Hollywood, and has been for 30-something years now. That's the value he's bringing. He's not a tech guy, nor does Twitter need him to be.
Small, mildly embarrassing flub of a first tweet, but Dalton's drawing way too many far-out inferences from it.
Sorry, I know I'm being dense, I just don't see Hollywood stuff in my feed very often at all.
And if Twitter is talking up Hollywood, doesn't that mean Hollywood needs Twitter more than Twitter needs a board member with connections into Hollywood?
A lot of famous people are on Twitter and some have rather large followings. Many interact with their fans daily (rather than just pushing out announcements). I thought that this was one of the big draws that brought more average people to the platform.
Not only this, but with respect to news media outlets, a number of their reporters/talking heads have active Twitter accounts.
Also, just because Hollywood can benefit from Twitter doesn't mean that they are going to show up at their door begging for a deal.
This is a fair and worthwhile distinction...still, Twitter is one of those services that seems hard to "get" without a good college-try at it -- I only joined because our company more-or-less said everyone should make an account. And now I'm thankful that happened because the mechanisms of Twitter make it a unique platform for consuming and sharing information...and yet without using it, I could not be convinced that it was nothing more than blogging for people who liked blogging about really trivial things.
It's a small embarrassment to Chernin to bobble his first Tweet. The more interesting story is that he's a Hollywood deal maker, and that's more reflective of Twitter's aspirations. While he may have said some stuff about MySpace when he was at News Corp, he's really a media entertainment guy.