Following the Dalai Lama? Watch out.

We’ve all heard and are quite excited about the Dalai Lama being on Twitter…but we need to, in these fledgling days of His Holiness’ venture into social media, keep an eye on our favorite refugee religious leader.

The Dalai Lama’s account, set up by his office in India, features links to interviews, photos and webcasts involving the spiritual leader. His account showed about 16 Tweets and 120,000 followers as of Thursday night.

Which raises an interesting question: If you follow the Dalai Lama, does that make you a Buddhist? ~ from Chicago Times

The important question is not whether or not following the Dalai Lama makes you a Buddhist, but what being on Twitter will do to the Dalai Lama.  These early days of Twitterdom can be very intimidating even for the enlightened mind, and with over 120 thousand followers now, and rapidly growing (he had 500 followers when elephant first blogged re his venture into tweetland) I am going to give him a bit of advise.

It seems that he is starting innocent enough with a few pictures, a webcast or two and some clips; but just wait until it goes to his head!

So keep an eye out for the…

Top 10 11 12 14 warning signs that Twitter has gone to the Dalai Lama’s Head!

1. You notice that suddenly the words “Social Media Guru” and “Lama of the Interwebz” start to appear on his profile bio rather than “Welcome to the official twitter page of the Office of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.”  In addition, he lets you in on the secrets of “Making Money Online”,  something about the Law of Attraction, and insisting that he can esoterically increase your followers through sutra study.
2. He starts following the trends and begins to fake quote himself…constantly.  How can you call someone on fake quoting himself?  He just said it!
3. His latest answer to the question “What are you doing” is “Being freaking pissed at the Chinese. And screw you @ConanOBrien“
4. He starts promoting his blog…constantly…and guest posts on the Huffington Post under the alias “Norman Pigmallion”.
5. He starts bragging about his number of follower milestones (1 million! Bitches)
6. He tweets during his next meeting with President Obama (This guy smells like cabbage and old people! I need socks)
7. He starts Auto DM’ing new followers with “Hi! I’m the Dalai Lama and my hat is much cooler than the Pope’s”
8. This starts to happen ~ Ol’friends pas away,new frnds appear.its jst lk days. An ol day passes,nw day arrvs.The impt thing is 2 mk it mningful: mningful frnd or a mningful day. ~ Not the same.
9. @DalaiLama starts to argue with @crystalsally and @ahkonlhamo and uses the #spreadthelove #stopthehate and #eatbabies hashtags.
10. Two words: LOST spoilers
11. #he #hashtags #every #freaking #word
12. Direct Messages you “LOL! This You?? www.bit.ly6796”
13. He argues re: heart opening chakras with @deepakchopra

And Lastly….

14. Retweets ZenDirtZenDust (instead of elephantjournal)

Cheers,

John

www.zendirtzendust.com