Morgan Stanley Advisers Take To Twitter To Do Nothing Very Interesting

Morgan Stanley is coming to Twitter, albeit in a very controlled, scripted way.

Morgan Stanley's 17,000 financial advisers will be joining Twitter and LinkedIn over the next few months, The New York Times' Dealbook reports. The firm initially dipped a toe in the social-media ocean last year, putting a pilot group of 600 employees on those sites. The experience seems to have been agreeable, because the rest of the company will now follow suit.

Though Morgan Stanley may seem kind of late to the social media game, the bank is actually at the cutting edge of its industry. Most Wall Street firms have approached social media very cautiously -- Goldman Sachs, for example, only joined Twitter in May, arriving several months after the often-more illuminating Goldman Sachs Elevator account.

That's a little strange to think about, since it seems like everybody and their mother and the Hulk version of themselves is already on Twitter. But microblogging is largely unexplored territory in the financial world, where information tends to be very tightly controlled, unless it's information about where hundreds of millions of dollars went or something like that.

Still, just because the Morgan hordes are joining Twitter doesn't mean they'll be popping off Kanye-style at all hours. Dealbook reports that until further notice, all tweets from Morgan Stanley advisers will be prewritten so as to comply with securities regulations, and presumably also to forestall any Kenneth Cole-type unpleasantness.

The upshot is that we'll be seeing a lot of tweets like "Tax attorney Andy Friedman says investors, wealthier taxpayers should be ready to make #tax moves this year," which comes by way of adviser Joe Wilson, and not a lot of tweets like "#Oomf lost $2 billion on miscalculated trades, smh," which we made up but which we totally give permission to be used in the inevitable parody account.