Social use of Social Networks - does it really change your credibility?

There’s been a lot of buzz this week about some recent American research into improved lecturer credibility by using social media for personal as well as academic use:

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a935339874~db=all

In the research, students were asked to rate the credibility of three imaginary lecturers based on their twitter posts - one posting entirely social tweets, one entirely academic and one a mixture. The results found that the purely social lecturer was perceived to have a higher credibility that the purely academic by the student sample. And there is already research showing that improved lecturer credibility leads to increased learning outcomes.

My colleague Peps considers this on his blog expanding the question to researcher credibility and thinking about issues of transparency as a lecturer. I have also seen an article today extending the ideas to business and corporate tweeting.

So I am interesting in validating some of these ideas and seeing if they hold true within a UK Higher Education environment. If we broaden the student/lecturer relationship to an audience/candidate one, then the sorts of questions I want to know the answers to are:

1. Does the perceived credibility depend on how familiar the audience are with the social platform?

2. If the audience and candidate are acquainted in real life does the social presence have less of an effect?

3. If the audience and candidate are acquainted, does the length of their relationship change the credibility?

4. If the candidate gets too social can we go past the peak of credibility?

5. Does the platform matter? Do Facebook audiences measure credibility in the same ways as Twitter audiences?

6. Is the lecturer/student relationship special in any way, or do employee/boss or colleague/colleague relationships follow the same model?

7. Does a company or institution tweeting in a social way increase their credibility or does the 'facelessness' get in the way?

8. Is having a lot of tweets/followers/following an influencing credibility factor?

etc.

What do you think? Is this worth researching? I would like to run a trial (using twitter as the platform) and see if initial data looks like this might be something worth pursuing - and this is where you (dear blog reader) come in.

I would like to construct a series of candidates with twitter streams for a questionnaire, and ask respondents to rate their perceptions of the candidates on a variety of criteria. The pic of my stream in this example is what I have in mind. Rather than doing this in a fake way, I was hoping some of you would volunteer to let me use you in my questionnaire as examples. I won't hide your identity (after all, your twitter streams are public) but I won't publicly publish results about you specifically (although you can have your own results). Is anyone happy for me to try?