After seeing several people in my Twitter stream talk about how they were in the process of creating keynotes on social media, I sent out one of my classic hyperbolic tweets.
Is there anyone who is NOT giving presentations on social media these days?
On Friday, D.C. news outlet The Hill reported that Congressman Joe Wilson has hired a “professional tweeter.” What exactly does this kind of title mean? In my mind, this term evokes a comical reference to characters from movies like “Leon: The Professional” or “The Transporter.”
Despite what you may have heard last week on CNN, this Twitter stuff is not about a cute blue birdie that you post updates on ice cream flavors or Hello Kitty shopping sprees. Now this is serious business. You need The Social Media Carpetbagger Professional.
We don’t know what that qualification means at this point, but I would guess that any decent one has a really awesome hidden wall that slides out to reveal an array of the latest Palm Pilots PDAs, micro SD grenades full of tweet-bots, and terabytes of hot-chick profile disguises for MySpace.
In case you didn’t catch the political news on Wilson this week, he’s the S.C. Republican Congressman who interrupted Pres. Obama’s health care speech with the “You lie!” Capitalizing on this spotlightfrom both the MSM and netroots, Wilson has raised a large sum of contributions. Funds total over a million bucks, in fact, and this has caused him to go shopping for the very best in ‘Social Media professionals’.
His 2010 challenger, Rob Miller, a former Marine who served in Iraq, has actually out raised him and surpassed the million-mark earlier. However, it has been a constant smack-talking exchange on the funding gains from the anomaly. Primary outlets for this rabble rousing have been the usual seedy hangouts in the blog underworld at FreeRepublic and DailyKos, respectively.
Wilson’s tweet-pro is David All, whose slogan is “The Nations First Conservative Web 2.0 Agency.” He also has a big client in Florida’s Marco Rubio, who is attempting to run a primary for the U.S. Senate race against Gov. Charlie Crist. Since he is vastly out gunned on funding, Rubio hopes to overcome the favored Gov. Crist with web based tactics on the cheap. He seems to have at least bought some credibility from this, securing a cover story “Yes, He Can”, from the highly-influential conservative magazine National Review. NR describes him, somewhat cynically, as one “who quotes Snoop Dogg lyrics on his Twitter account.”
The Wilson v. Miller fundraising battle will be the one to watch for now, as Wilson’s ‘Professional’ is going up against the more established trends and organizations of left-wing power. In Miller’s corner is the online fundraising structure from ActBlue and web from NGP software.
Since Miller already had this in place, it has certainly helped in gaining a bigger edge in ‘retaliation’ funds from the Wilson outburst. What remains to be seen is how this matchup will play out if Wilson is truly intent on parlaying most of his new money into a nation-wide web following.
Finally, the Wall Street Journal writes today that free information online means that campaign funding and regulation is becoming obsolete, and therefore the SCOTUS should invalidate the McCain-Feingold regulations on contributions. If this does happen, it would be a huge transformation in free speech issues and development of political communication.
I’ve just returned from the Palm Beach County Tweetup. For those of you that don’t know, a Tweetup is basically a flashmob of Twitter users in a particular geographic area coming together to talk about… Twitter. Yes, also to drink.
The nice thing is the conversation usually evolves away from Twitter into other interesting topics. I met a lot of great, nice, intelligent people there and only one certified social media douchebag. Out of about 35-40 people, this is a pretty great ratio. However, the subject of social media douchebaggery was still on my mind since I had a few conversations about it and other Twitter noise or spam issues while there.
The best possible outcome for a social service like Twitter is for users to create their own environments and, even better, extend them to the real world in order to make lasting connections with like-minded people. That’s why I think the Tweetup trend is pretty great. The other part is spontaneous “Is anyone else here?” type meetings. Both of these require a certain threshold of userbase in order to function properly and to be viable. It also requires a critical mass in order to draw attention for other potential users to get involved which in-turn makes those functions more viable—somewhat of a chicken and egg scenario there.
When I first joined Twitter, these abilities just weren’t there. That’s simply because there weren’t enough people using the service in order to even consider asking the void “Is anyone also at this Starbucks right now?” That was unheard of.
Unfortunately, this delicate sweet spot of just-massive-enoughness is fleeting. There’s a bell curve with talking to a void on one end and talking to robots (or social media douchebags) on the other.
Twitter is on the other side.
Some might say it has jumped the shark. We already know it’s apparently not so popular with the kiddies. You can still operate Twitter in a valuable way if you choose to. If you don’t follow everyone. If you don’t just spam out shit all day long. If you use it to actually connect with valuable people or get quick customer service from great companies.
I’ll continue to do my best. Block the spammers and value my little Twitter stream until it dies.
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