Tag Archives: Twitter

There is no “perfect” tweet

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Earlier today on Twitter, the brilliant (and comical) Faris Yakob tweeted about a piece from Marketing Chap titled “Why blueprints for the perfect tweet are perfectly absurd”. Even before reading the article, I was in complete agreement, but found his jovial commentary enlightening.

The notion that there is a formula for how to make a perfect tweet epitomizes the thinking that defined the age of push-marketing, where messages were sent to customers regardless of who they were. While today’s marketing departments can geo-target messages, there still is no objectively perfect tweet for your audience, because your audience is not homogenous. The “perfect” tweet will connect you and your audience, and in fact, the best tweet often comes from your audience TO you.

Marketing Chap’s post was commenting on PR Daily, who released a graphic earlier in an article titled “A blueprint for the perfect tweet”. They claimed that the perfect tweet should include:

1. Message:
- Call to action: Tell readers what you want them to do.
- Hashtags: Include one or two to increase your reach among people who don’t follow you.
- Tone: Use your own voice, but in a professional way.
- Format: Use a mix of headlines, questions and statistics to drive clicks and retweets.
2. Link:
- Shortened URLs: Bit.ly links earn the most retweets.
3. Blank space:
- Leave room for at least 20 characters at the end of your tweet so retweeters can add comments.

As Marketing Chap eloquently points out: “This is a style of tweet for pushing a message, pure and simple, and I am firmly in the camp that says that social media is not at its best when it is merely foisting content on followers.” He goes on to explore the Twitter account of the author and finds that this individual (Gerry Moran) indeed follows his own guidelines, but that does not make any of the tweets “perfect”. Marketing Chap’s comment mid-way through the piece identifies perhaps the most direct issue with the type of tweeting Moran prescribes:

“To my mind, the key word in the term ‘social media’ is ‘social,’ and the sort of tweets Mr. Moran advocates are decidedly asocial. What I mean to say is, there is no social interaction whatsoever. The @SAPNorthAmerica account is really just a cleverly packaged RSS feed hosted on a social media platform.”

He instead suggests the following guidelines, acknowledging that he doesn’t enjoy being prescriptive in general:

  • Be generous. Besides being a splendid way to learn, being generous with other chaps’ content is an unbeatable way to cement a connection.
  • Be unpredictable. If one tweets about the same thing again and again then why should a chap bother to stay tuned?
  • Be interesting. Tweets that are humorous, clever or memorable will get chaps to pay attention to the next tweet and the tweet after that.

When we look at some recently well-received tweets, many of them include few of the above elements, but much more closely follow Marketing Chaps’ guidelines. Example 1: Audi’s tweet during the Superbowl:
Screen Shot 2013-04-06 at 2.05.10 PM

Example 2: Rowan Singh asking “what to do if your child is being eaten by a camel?”
Screen Shot 2013-04-06 at 2.17.23 PM

Both of these examples received a number of responses and spread far beyond the original poster, which may or may not have been their goal.

Which brings me to the conclusion: The perfect tweet is one that achieves your goal. As with most things in life, making intentional decisions most often leads to your desired outcome. So, when wondering “what should I tweet?”, ask yourself “Who am I communicating with?” and “What do I want them to get from this tweet?” I bet it will yield much more success than arbitrary links and hashtags.

Strong, weak, or necessary; the value of social media connections

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As soon as I read Malcolm Gladwell‘s New Yorker article “Small Change; Why the revolution will not be tweeted,” I knew a firestorm was about to be unleashed across the Internet. It wasn’t so much that I thought Gladwell was wrong, it was just that he seemed a bit confused, and I waited patiently for people like Jonah Lehrer and Henry Jenkins to respond, since it was inevitable.

I’ll start by saying that I’ve read Gladwell’s work and I have much respect for his ideas. I will also say that I’ve read Clay Shirky‘s Here Comes Everybody, the book (and main set of premises which Gladwell is attacking) along with other of Shirky’s work and I agree with him more. But I am going to leave my bias out of this and return to what’s misguided about Gladwell’s argument. Continue reading →

If the medium is the message, Twitter has a lot to say

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While I had originally intended to post about the New Media Literacies paper “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture,” I opened my computer and found Paul Levinson’s chapter on Twitter, from his book New New Media, thanks to the mass amounts of PDFs which I downloaded from my school library and have yet to read.

Although Levinson title’s the chapter “Twitter,” and indeed goes to great lengths in his exploration of Twitter, the chapter read more like an examination of what new media represents to society, largely in part to his discussion of Marshall McLuhan. On the second page of the chapter, Levinson states, “instant publication—whether of text, images, sounds or videos—is one of the hallmarks of new new media.” In our society, it would be hard to disagree, especially with Isaiah Mustafa and the team at Wieden + Kennedy cranking out Old Spice videos in record time. (More on that at Fast Company)

In regards to McLuhan, Levinson points out that much of his writing looks like what we see in today’s current twittersphere, with statements like “nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society” or “the content of any medium is another medium.” Self-contained statements such as these are popular on Twitter, as they give us a lot to think about in 140 characters. Yet, what McLuhan really said that addresses Twitter is his notion of media “effects” and the “tetrad.”

McLuhan designed the tetrad as a pedagogical tool, phrasing his laws as questions with which to consider any medium:
1. What does the medium enhance?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?
- From Wikipedia

This notion connects to what Levinson asserts a few pages earlier:

“The automatic sending to Twitter (via applications or “apps”) of links to anything and everything on the Web … and the instantly subsequent, automatic relay of these tweets to Facebook and “meta” new new systems…constitute a self-perpetuating, not entirely planned, expanding network that has much in common with living organisms and evolutionary systems.”

Twitter is essentially aggregating all mediums and media into it, albeit through many other systems, (Bitly, Twitpic, etc). We see proof of this through the wide use of Twitter, thanks to it being the most convenient digital tool for both interpersonal and mass communication at the same time.

I highly recommend reading Levinson’s chapter, (and probably the whole book, though I myself have not yet read it), and giving thought to his ideas. He makes many strong assertions and I have only touched on a few of them here. You can download the chapter on Twitter free here.

What can you do with a rhetoric degree?

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Well, looking at the way that things are going in society, the answer is “a lot.”

On Thursday, I was sitting in on Professor Nacho Cordova’s Rhetoric 350T class, New Media and Technology, as they discussed the way that we mediate and mediatize our lives for digital spaces. As this discussion progressed, Twitter came up, and the class engaged each other in ways that it can be useful or can be wasteful. This idea connects to what Clay Shirky calls “publish than filter” in his most recent book Here Comes Everybody. As this discussion unfolded, I began thinking back to the foundations of rhetoric, as a “means of discovering the available means of persuasion” (Aristotle) or “the way that we use language to impose order on our experiences” (Kenneth Burke). With things like Twitter (or digital storytelling, as the overall discussion was focused on) we have to be even more selective with what we are publicizing in order to gain an audience.

The concern that comes with this, as was true in the classical rhetorical period, is how do we focus on the good rather than the trivial? Just as I was thinking of this question, my cousin posted this on Twitter:
Armon's Tweet
I read through the article, and found much value in what it said. The line that stuck out to me most was made in regards to marketing, which may often associate with the study of rhetoric:

For instance, marketers learn to satisfy our desire to be closer to nature by selling us Patagonia fleece jackets that we wear in our all-terrain Land Rovers driving to the mall.

How true this is. While many are using buzzwords (or ideographs, if you want to go there) to account for movements in today’s society (think “Hope,” “Change,” and “Progress” with Obama), we also are losing value in doing this the wrong way.

One of the biggest problems I see with this keywording is done in regards to environmentalism. Think about how many “green” things you can buy these days: mugs, thermoses, bags, shoes, etc. The problem with these products in connection to sustainability and recycling is that you do not need to consume more in order to consume less.* In order to reduce consumption, start with the basic action of… reducing consumption! This doesn’t seem to be a difficult concept to understand, but because we mark things as “green,” everyone wants to buy them. STOP IT!

But, I digress. The second part of the article that I felt really resonated with me was in the conclusion, which I felt connected to things like classical rhetoric, Buddhism, everyday life, etc.

“I’m inclined to think of a culture, even one as unwieldy as ours, as a body, and like all bodies it needs to be kept in balance. One part of it craves the mundane, the trivial, the stupid. Another pulls in the opposite direction, toward the profound, the subtle, the glorious. Either extreme is stultifying, but the balance between them is healthy in the sense that it can be sustained.” – Gary Hardcastle

Buddhism talks about this notion in terms of balance and karma. Aristotle talks about it in the Phaedrus, where he describes a chariot (the soul), made up of a good horse (good will) and a bad horse (bodily appetites), which are driven by a charioteer (reason). Both Hardcastle and this metaphor speak to the human condition. Sometimes what we want is right. Sometimes what we want is wrong. However, (and this is what I ultimately got from “Trivialization”) if we want to move forward as a society, we need to be better at calling out what is wrong, as well as working for what is right. We have gotten too comfortable letting the wrongs slip by us disguised as right. It is time to reclaim civilization.

If you feel like I haven’t really answered the question posed in the title, I’m sorry. Rhetoric is about breaking down language into meaning and looking at how we use those words to explain our lives. This piece gets at the idea that the study of rhetoric helps you to arrive at a deeper understanding of the world you live in. If you want to talk about this more, email me. I’d love to hear from you.