London bridges in Twitter spat

Tower Bridge’s official Twitter, set up to alert tourists to when the world famous bridge will be ‘lifting’, has triggered a surreal competition for attention from a neighbouring bridge.

ImLondonBridge, purporting to represent the interests of Tower’s non-lifting rival, has been poking fun at the repetitive nature of TB’s tweets which plot the daily passage of high masted boats, e.g.,  ”I am opening for the SB Lady Daphne which is passing down stream”, ” I am closing after the SB Lady has passed downstream”

ImLondonBridge’s witty heckling – “If you took a film of @towerbridge and speeded it up, it would look like the world’s least exciting pinball machine. Without any balls” - has attracted 1730 followers to date, close to TowerBridge’s 2117. According to The Telegraph, this has sparked a copycat spat between Severn Bridge and The Clifton Suspension Bridge, who have been facing-off over toll charges and general ‘awesomeness’

Sitting here with my PR hat on I’m just impressed by the coverage this is getting - the latest demonstration of Twitter’s potential as a publicity generating machine. In this case there doesn’t seem to be any PR agenda. If it was a planned campaign, to promote say, Tower Bridge’s engine room tours combined perhaps with the Greenwich comedy festival this weekend, the results could have been tremendous.