A half-interesting article over at AlterNet raises the same question as in the title of this post: Are celebrities destroying Twitter?
Don’t write any “Well, he loves Oprah, so he’s biased”-style comments, please. I’m totally going to be a professional about this.
In fact, I’m going to open with this: Yes. Yes, they are (Maybe a lie, maybe not. We’ll find out later I suppose).
Twitter started a few years back with the intent of keeping friends updated with what other friends are doing at that very moment. Through its many mobile capabilities, it succeeded with its goal, albeit in a rather poorly executed manner (let’s face it: their idea of coding is definitely not scalable). So you had friends talking with each other on a site rather than via instant messenger, which had been around a lot longer and was a lot easier to use.
But rather than make this a talk about how there was no point to Twitter’s very existence, let’s look at what happened next:
The marketers stepped in.
Slowly, the flood gates opened, and spammers from all across the world joined Twitter, followed you, and when you followed them back, they spammed you. All of you. A lot. So you de-followed them. And it was good.
And then the articles came.
Yes, you remember those: they’re still being posted by the late starters who are just now getting it that Twitter is a great resource for branding and marketing. They’re putting up how-to guides and conveniently add in their spam-tastic profiles complete with auto-responders at the end.
And then the television stations joined.
They were losing viewers and needed a new way to market themselves, so they set up Twitter profiles to make people feel like they’re ahead of the curve.
And now, here come the celebrities.
What better way to prevent from dropping out of the public eye all while continuing your social whoring than Twitter? It’s 140 characters of thoughtless text. There is no way to develop a story in so many words. There is no personality. There is no pressure!
So the celebrities came, and now you think they’re destroying Twitter.
Hah! Hardly. They’re just so much easier to blame! They have faces you can see every day if you’d like, yet you’ve never had any personal interaction with them, so you don’t actually know them.
You want to know who ruined Twitter?
Television stations. They ruined it! They posted every story, abusing their audience, and bringing no real value that can’t be gained from watching a simple newscast.
I’m kidding. It was the bloggers!
Yes, those bloggers who claim to be “Social Media experts/gurus/mavens/etc.” They ruined Twitter by giving those marketers the guidelines and reasons to spam everybody. You made this happen, because you had to pretend to know something by writing this tripe.
I’m kidding, of course. It was the spammers.
Hah! They’re easy to blame, right? Nobody likes spam. Everybody gets it. It touches a special place in our hearts after hearing about stories such as an old lady getting tricked into sending money to Nigeria.
But no. Who ruined Twitter?
The original users. That’s right. Take it back to the good ol’ days. Or, you know, 2006. Whatever. What did Twitter look like?
Nothing. There were no power users. Everybody knew everybody. It was like a small town, operating in its still-pristine state. No spammers. No celebrities. Just friends keeping up with friends.
Then y’all got greedy. You had to share it with the world in order to gain recognition as an early adopter. You had to write how-to guides.
And when the spammers came in, besides piss and moan, what did you do?
Nothing. In fact, you wrote more guides on how to use it as a marketing tool.
So, no. Don’t you dare blame celebrities for Twitter’s unfortunate state. I mean, Ashton Kutcher can be blamed for plenty of things, and you can throw things at him all you want. I don’t care. But don’t say that he, or Oprah, or Shaq are the reason for all this. Look at yourself. If you hadn’t sat idly by while the site was abused for three years, then maybe it would have turned out differently. But you’ve got no right to blame anybody other than yourselves.
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[...] Michael Noker placed an observative post today on Are Celebrities Destroying Twitter? « Marketing, Web Development …Here’s a quick excerptDon’t write any “Well, he loves Oprah, so he’s biased”-style comments, please. I’m totally going to be a professional about this. In fact, I’m going to open with this: Yes. Yes, they are (Maybe a lie, maybe not. … [...]
It’s interesting that you’re bringing up the issue of polluting the twittersphere. I’ve had this topic on my mind, but I never got to writing it down. Your mind reading powers serve you well. :-)
The commercialization of Twitter is only going to exacerbate, because more and more brands are discovering it. Sadly enough, only few of them are relevant. Apparently, we need a better mechanism to weed off the spam. Any ideas?
Don’t you know? All former-southerners-turned-New-Mexicans are telepathic.
Anywho, yes, it will get much worse, because everybody’s discovering it.
My mechanism to avoid spam? Apathy.
Seriously, the best solution is to just not care at all. Not denial. I know it exists. Not attack. I don’t want to spend any time destroying it. Just… stop caring.