Hello there:
Remember when tweeting was a novelty?
That is if you weren't' a bird. A story caught my eye this week about the fired New Yorker writer who helped birth Media Twitter. Dan Baum has died (because he’d apologize for what he's done, if he could.)
One month after I started tweeting, I was asking "should corporations get accounts?" After all, I had a corporate job. Yes, and the business uses for Twitter I wrote a year earlier, when I thought it was a social network in the making. Or how about this short post I titled "You're on Twitter, Now What?" that got picked up by Mashable dating three months before his esploit.
It was 2009, two short years after dealing with "the fail whale" to use a medium we had no idea how it would last (many didn't). A short month later I figured out Twitter could be super useful for events. I started a Twitter chat, too.
I sat a whole weekend researching people who were sharing good content to build a list that November. 100 PR people worth following on Twitter became an instant sensation I remember seeing 4,000 page views early in the morning. I was playing human algorithm, wasn't I? Except for I did care and the reactions were all over the place... (there's me cobbling stats together report.)
Here's Twitter following in my footsteps two months later with the rollout of lists. Twittertales, the eBook I created was promptly copied (in name and intent) by Twitter a couple of months or weeks later without attribution whatsoever—not even for the inspiration. Here's me reaching out to ask for stories.
I thought Twitter could become the news system of the future, though as my experience shows and Nieman Lab points out, all innovation was basically done by users. That included all news that fit in a tweet. I wrote posts with suggestions for Twitter as well, but they seemed to prefer copying on the quiet. Ironic, given how their stream is full of shouts.
Companies started using Twitter for customer service. I spotted @Comcastcares early on, even wrote a front page article for Fast Company's website at the time (I was among the first group of expert bloggers there at Marketing Profs Daily Fix.) More companies joined in with dedicated customer service accounts.
Maybe it's time to bring back levity like you know you're spending too much time on Twitter when-kind of posts. You don't have to wonder what Twitter could have been, you can just do a search on my blog and find dozens of articles that include tweets as screen shots.
I always felt it was much better to post my thoughts on my site—if I was going to be on record, I might as well be that record. And yes, I also wrote about Twitter and social media in general as good distribution channels. In the early days, you could get decent organic traffic that way... then "ad" and "tech" moved in together.
My most useful use of Twitter today is filtering content through lists. I curate more than a dozen closely (out of 40.) I could write a post about how useful they are in my research, or what content does better, but I probably already did on both counts.
Dan Baum stopped tweeting altogether in 2015. I'm sure he didn't miss the rise of the bots. Technology is like this. It finds its uses and users (doesn't it sound like drug pushing lingo?) and changes, or disappears. But it does change us.
I still use Twitter to share articles and ideas, but mostly to listen and observe where culture is moving.
Trend alert:
There are signs that Twitter is moving once again from "fortune cookie lone wolves" to conversation among members of the same tribe. This is in line with what's happening in general in media production (more about this next week.)
Novelty doesn't distract me from my work—a good thing, since I focus on what endures. Focusing on what endures helps you spot trends earlier: it comes with a built-in practice in signal-to-noise detection.
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Stories make our culture
The film's title, Amarcord, is a univerbation of the Romagnolo phrase a m'arcôrd ("I remember").
It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and was nominated for two more Academy Awards: Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
Romagnolo is a Vulgate language (not a dialect). I have a written record of it in a book that collects the poems a poor countryside village priest
wrote during his life: he was my mother's uncle.
A good person, he once gave his brand new shirt to a beggar who had nothing. That's all he had.
The book is a piece of history of my family. But also a piece of history, as it starts with "impressions from the war." The Church that was his charge since December 31, 1929 filled with people displaced from the city by the air raids. The bombing reached the small village of Villagrappa on October 29, 1944.
While people ran into the hills, Don Antonio stayed with two Germans and their radio as company. An air raid on November 8, 1944 demolished the rectory, his home, and forced him to seek hospitality elsewhere. He never forgot the generosity of his hosts.
Tales about the front (members of the clergy had to go through military service), at the end of WWII and the funds collected to rebuild are in his poems and nursery rhymes.
I treasure his pragmatic wisdom, as I remember Don Antonio. His birth day was October 19, 1902.
All could be characters in a Fellini movie (who lived about 30-45 minutes to the East of Villagrappa.)
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Make a fake, tell a fake
Psychologists in the UK have created a game that pre-debunks COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Research shows it can be more effective to give people information about how to identify conspiracy theories or misinformation before they're exposed to it.
- The current game is called Go Viral. Players learn the deceptive tactics of those who spread such misinformation by doing them. Pre-bunking is about countering cognitive biases.
- If only primary school taught interactive thought process!
- Of course, we have one interactive tool for simulation available to all: conversation.
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The words you wear
Words in business are like fashion. "You try a word on because important people around you are saying it and getting results, but you may not actually know what it means."
- I have article title envy right now: the Words you Wear is an excellent mini-story in itself. This reminds me...
- I'm thinking some of the words he lists are euphemisms.
- Word geeks will enjoy the additions in the comments thread. Also, enthusiasm may mitigate the effect of excessive use of buzzwords.
- What are the most useless phrases in marketing?
- I'll share some of mine: "Lots of moving parts," "Best practice" (seems to be on many lists), "Think outside the box," "Take it to the next level"
- What are yours?
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Use structure to your advantage
We're coming up on "trick or treat." That's a short hand for a system wrapped around a story. We can use structure to our advantage: test, trace, treat can help us see some light at the end of the funnel.
- This week I published an article that was decades in the making.
- People who shared it said I weaved "insights into the nature of capital, culture, and corporations into it."
- We overlook the role companies and corporations play in society.
- But we also misunderstand why it works.
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“Culture cannot be achieved
without knowing your own history."
- Dario Fo
Italian actor, playwright, comedian, singer,
theater director, stage designer, songwriter, painter
recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature
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