When my older son graduated college last spring, he had a job offer in his pocket. I followed that company on Twitter and then immediately forgot that I had. They didn’t tweet very much, and the tweets that did come through were from their British division (judging by their spelling of “personalisation,” so I didn’t expect to see any references to my kid and his work.

I knew that, this week, he’d be in Philly for work, attending a big event. And there were suddenly lots of tweets from a usually-quiet company account. Some of the tweets had pictures.

Like this one.

I retweeted it, adding a “there’s my kid!” remark. It’s cool to see him all grown up and hard at work.

The next day, my son called to tell me that one of his coworkers had commented, “Hey, somebody’s MOM retweeted my tweet about the event yesterday.”

My son said that this quickly morphed into a discussion about whose moms even know how to tweet, and that he’d said that I work for a blog and know more about social media than he does.

Which was quickly followed by, “Is this YOUR mom?” as a phone showing my retweet was handed over.

Well, yes, it was me.

So he called to ask how I’d found out about the event hashtag. (No such luck. I only saw the photo because his company was retweeting everything with that hashtag.)

At least I didn’t tweet this version for his coworkers to see.

He didn’t say he wanted me to unfollow, though, asking instead if there had been any other photos of him in the Twitter stream.

It’s neat to listen to him talk about his work. I’ve talked to him about mine, because he can appreciate what it is to build a page with jump links in HTML. (I was ridiculously proud when I learned how to do that.)

I’ll probably try harder to refrain from retweeting any more photos from his company. No promises, though.

Photo source: twitter.com/singerde
Bottom photo modified by the author.