mway’s blog

I would like to revisit the idea that when you give people who have any number of minor social issues something like Twitter, you’re asking for trouble.  The hyper person, the boring but overly conversational person, the oh-my-god-I-just-found-the-best-deal-on-plaid-pants-pls-RT person, the I HAVE THE BEST SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING IDEAS EVER LET’S TALK ABOUT IT… BUT AFTER I’M DONE AT MY 6TH INDUSTRY CONFERENCE THIS WEEK person, and the incredibly simple bandwagon tutorial person are all common people to encounter on Twitter.

To be blunt, every time I read a tweet even vaguely related to anything in the above paragraph, I wish I were a) blind, b) mildly retarded and couldn’t understand what I was reading, or c) naive enough to think that any of those cliche (and common) scenarios were worth reading about.

I’ll get to the point – if you are using Twitter in a semi-professional capacity, or if you have more than two thousand followers or so, you should be tweeting with incredible scrutiny.  You should not be retweeting stupid things, or assaulting your followers with a consistent stream of RT’s that contain nothing but mindless content.  Yes, I know – “stupid things” and “mindless content” are subjective – but we all know where to draw the line.  If you don’t know, I’d be happy to draw it for you.

Consider the following:

I especially love the suggestions people give for how to be just as annoying as they are.  I have a tip (write this down): if you find yourself feeling like “you don’t know what to retweet”, DON’T FUCKING RETWEET ANYTHING. PERIOD.

Twitter is great, fun, useful, a cure for boredom, etc.  As with anything, there is an inherent amount of bullshit involved regardless – the spammers, the con artists, the “U CAN MAKE $80K/YR WORKING FROM HOME!” people that have especially come out of the woodwork lately, etc – but everyone should still do their part to not contribute to an epic humanity fail.

This also gives rise to the fact that, since Twitter gained popularity – and since Facebook became mainstream – everyone is out to become a social media expert. There isn’t anything in the world that makes me quite as nauseous as a teeming multitude of “social media experts” all screaming to be heard and out-tweet each other. I shudder at the thought.

Anyway, more on that later.

For the record: I’m sure the people that I used as examples above are fantastic, talented, knowledgeable people.  This is nothing personal, just that someone needed to go under the bus for the sake of example.