Off The Grid PR

Posted on Tuesday, July 7, 2009 10:00 PM EST

Admittedly, that's an absurdist title. But, as I'll show, perhaps not so absurdist given recent postings on Twitter.

Believe me. I am a great fan of Twitter: I'm as ardent an advocate, passionista, social media evangelista as nary can be found in the Southeastern United States. I carefully curate my small Twitter feed. I endeavor to keep a pretty high S/N ratio of information flow. I promote Twitter as a highly-effective low-cost new media channel to clients. Why I don't even attach much credence to recent forecasts that Facebook (through its continuous "Follow Twitter's development path" updates) ultimately prevails over Twitter.

But something, well, specifically four tweets and their associated blog postings, struck me as a bit odd yesterday.

Mind you, not one of these postings alone seen on separate days would capture my extended attention. However, that all of them occurred within the same 24-hour period definitely captured the cross-correlators within my pattern recognition system.

It all started with the subject of a Friendfeed posting yesterday....

What If the Beatles Used Twitter?

This somewhat whimsical blog post of course asserted that The Beatles would have doubled their professional and personal fortune if they had been able to mirror their lives on the Net, much as celebrities MC Hammer [1 Mn+ followers] and @britneyspears [2.28 M followers] do today.

Okay- I'll buy that argument: Twitter access would have made Beatlemania larger than The Sloan Great Wall. (Hint: largest known physical structure in the Universe). Sure.

While still ruminating on that, oddly enough, I encounter a tweet leading me to...

What If the Buddha Used Twitter...

 

A thought-provoking, sometimes profound and definitely charming piece, Soren Gordhamer's article in yesterday's Huffington Post focuses on how the key figure in Buddhism would use Twitter. For instance, he writes...

 

Better than a thousand senseless verses is one that brings the hearer peace. -- The Buddha

The second [approach] is that the quality of our tweets matter much more than the quantity of them. One meaningful tweet a day is much better than posting numerous tweets that do not add value to the world. Of course, what "adds value" can be debated. There are a lot of silly tweets and links to videos that bring smiles to millions of people. Tweets do not have to be serious, but I think the Buddha would say that the real mission of life is not to produce large quantities of anything, including tweets, but it is instead to make a positive impact. One tweet that does that is better than a million that do not.

Yes, I thought, this too all rings true. And in fact Soren's observation is a great palliative against some of the depressing scores some of us get from the Twitter grader/scorer algorithms. To be ranked a "Great Tweeter", many of these programs insist you tweet with the frequency and ferocity of @cnnbrk (CNN Breaking News).

Perhaps Soren's observation even makes us look a bit more sympathetically at the AdAge twitter lashing that some marquis name ad agencies took yesterday --- for not tweeting enough or properly. (With some 8000+ bit.ly click-throughs to the original article link so far, there's clearly a swarm of on-lookers to watch old media get bashed for not being cool enough to fully and quickly enough imbibe their social media juice.)

Here I think: Hmm..Buddha should know. Even at the most conservative estimates, there are some 300 Mn to 1.3 Bn Buddhist followers worldwide. Compare that to Twitter's 10-20 Mn followers (loosely correcting the Comscore estimates against the 60% "Qwitter" factor from the A.C. Nielsen study. (Luckily, Twitter isn't competing with Buddhism for venture capital...)

Some hours later... I stumble upon a tweet from the intellectual Utne Reader, informing me...

Okay- this is getting big. The Beatles.  The Buddha.  The Pope.   How many marquis name co-brandings can be out there in one day alone? (Okay- I'm stretching the papal reference i know...)

What possible other illustrious groups can we associate the brand name Twitter with?

Surely, there are no higher authorities -- after all this is one 24-hour timeframe here, folks.

Well, rock my K.D. Payne sentiment analyzers, folks, if there wasn't one more in the daily queue...

Twitter Suggested for Nobel Prize

 

By the end of the day, no less than the Silicon Valley Business Journal confides that "Twitter Suggested for Nobel Prize". That's right, Mark Pfeile, a former Deputy National Security Advisor for the Bush administration, is apparently nominating Twitter for the Nobel Peace Prize. True enough- with foreign journalists and media thrown out of Iran, Twitter provided oft times the only window to the world to follow the post-election Iranian situation.

As The Christian Monitor put it,  "... in the past month, 140 characters were enough to shine a light on Iranian oppression and elevate Twitter to the level of change agent."

Most remarkably, Twitter's SMS news service included the participation of more technically-inclined Twitterers (eg. John Perry Barlow and the EFF) who aided in getting the news out of Iran via proxy servers. This provided us with a humanity-bonding linkage to news events that the world had not previously experienced before.  (So I hope it's clear: It is not at all my position to dispute that Twitter deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.)

What Then is the Point of All This?

 

My point here is simply that such a 24-hour tweet roundup of Twitter associations with some of the world's mega luminaries has me feeling --well-- just a bit of woozy "story stock" sickness.

It's as though someone were trying to pry my jaws open to swallow a 15-course meal including oysters rockefeller, roast duck, foie gras pate and baked trufled brie en croute - all down my gullet in one swallow. Frankly - it's feeling March 2000-ish (the period immediately preceding the dotcom bomb where new e-commerce stock valuations were running their highest).

Now what's particularly a little uneasy-making is that any one of the these stories has merit. But the gestalt of their conjoint appearance, while not arousing suspicion of a strategic PR initiative, at least makes one think that some of this confabulation is encouraged. Perhaps it provides a "psychic PR bridge" for Twitter investors, a much-needed bridge until the much-awaited hard-nosed monetization model appears.

To me, Twitter is a fabulous technology. But that doesn't mean it needs confabulation.

What do you think?

Is Twitter over-hyped? Do these articles centering on "What if [INSERT FAMOUS NAME HERE] Used Twitter" enlighten or obscure?