twitter fail blog
sharing the good, and exposing the best of the worst on twitter
Quick! Get Alanis on the phone!
From Dictionary.com
i·ron·ic/i’ränik/
Adjective:
- Using or characterized by irony.
- Happening in the opposite way to what is expected, thus typically causing wry amusement.
The word “ironic” has been posted a lot today, when people talked about this tweet:
The horrible, hateful person who wrote it meant that tweet exactly the way it was written. The fact that it was written on an iPhone isn’t ironic. It is, however, pretty hypocritical. If there is a God, a heaven, and a hell, how surprised will all these haters be when their brief time in front of St. Peter is followed by a quick trip downstairs? Just saying…
We’re still scratching our collective brains to try to figure out exactly which sins Steve Jobs taught us. We must have missed that day in Computer Science class. The most important innovation he gave us was a user-friendly interface so that non-technical people could use computers. Although a lot of those people now use computers to view porn, we’re pretty sure Steve didn’t have to teach them that part. Pervs are pretty darned resourceful.
The next noteworthy misuse of “ironic” comes from Brand Link Communications:
BrandlinkComm sent Jenny (@thebloggess) the kind of pitch all bloggers get and hate. They thought she would be thrilled to write a blog post about an overexposed celebrity doing something that none of us care about. Jenny responded with her usual wit, by sending them a picture of Wil Wheaton collating, and “Jose” at BrandlinkComm called her an effing bitch when he hit “reply all.” (Go read the whole story here: The Bloggess & Jose – we’ll wait)
Technology did not fail Jose. Jose failed in the use of technology. The fact that this happened the same day Steve Jobs passed away is not ironic. It’s just coincidence. Nonetheless, for Jose, pretty unfortunate. Just like all the other unfortunate things in Alanis’ song
Even more unfortunate for Jose was that he lit a spark that started a PR firestorm when he said, “…maybe you should be flattered that you are even viewed relevant enough to be pitched at all…”
We should all feel flattered to receive PR pitch spam? Many of us just hit the delete button and move on. Thankfully, Jenny takes the next step, and brings us along for the ride.
Oh, and Jose? By the end of the day, Jenny will have more comments on her blog post about this than you have followers on Twitter. That’s Relevance. You should be so lucky. (That’s ironic.)
Social Media and Real Life are Two Different Things
Your “friends” on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media are your social media friends. If you haven’t met them IRL (in real life), they are not your real friends. Before you hit the comments, we’re going to give you a case in point: @treypennington.
If you don’t know who he was, join the club. We heard of him, quite some time ago, when he followed/unfollowed/followed/unfollowed us. Chalked him up to be yet another “social media marketing guru” who was building his follower count. He had tons of followers (no surprise), and most, if not all, of those followers thought he was their real friend.
Shortly after posting the following tweet, Trey went to church and killed himself.
Now that he is dead, there are thousands of tributes on twitter, as people share their shock and grief.
We’ve lost 3 very important people in our real life recently, so we know grief. It’s not up to us to tell people not to grieve over someone they really didn’t know, but YOU DIDN’T REALLY KNOW HIM. You never had coffee together, or went to a barbeque at his house, and he never once helped you move. You watched his videos, read his blog, or retweeted his social media insights. You saw what he wanted you to see.
Our hearts go out to his family, who can’t believe they missed the signs, his wife, who will blame herself for his decision, and his children who will wonder why Daddy didn’t love them enough to stay. They bear wounds that will scar, but never truly heal.
Depression is a mental illness that encompasses the entire body and mind. Suicide is not the answer. Committing suicide in public? We want to curse him for hurting so many people who knew him, thought they knew him, and others who witnessed his death. He spread his personal pain far and wide while ending his own. We want to point to the fact that he’s trending on twitter as his final hurrah.
But we won’t. What we will do instead is remind you that there are some awesome people around you. Walk away from your pc or mac, turn off your social media apps, and talk to someone IRL. Invite a friend to dinner, or to come over and watch the game. Call your dad. Stop by grandma’s house. Surprise your girlfriend with flowers. Have conversations and give out hugs. Touch base with the important people in your life so that when one of them needs you, you can be there for them. And so they can be there for you.
If there is one message to be learned from death, it is this: We all die. Some, sooner than others. Every time you think you’ll talk to them “later,” you’re missing an opportunity that might not come around again. Your twitter followers can’t hold your hand. That’s something only your real family and friends can do. Go live life. Do it now.
The Bloggess is Not a Douche-Canoe
In our last post, we used the phrase “douche-canoe” to describe an idiot we regretting following in the first place. You probably know it’s our practice to avoid following “online marketing superman” and “social media guru” types, but occasionally, one sneaks in without us realizing it. Usually, they start out as normal people, just making connections on twitter, and then they play the follower game until their numbers make them appear to be influential, and their ego grows in a direct relationship to their inflated follower count. When we discover we’re following these posers, we unfollow, but in the case of this particular douche-canoe, it wasn’t soon enough
Unfortunately, to at least one person, it appeared as if we were calling @thebloggess a douche-canoe. Not even. We think she is awesome, and read her blog religiously. In fact, since we haven’t been to church in years, you might say The Bloggess is our religion.
We failed. The reason for the confusion is totally ours. “Douche-canoe” was originally coined on the now defunct (and we miss it terribly) column: Ask the Bloggess. We wanted to link to the definition, and since that column is now gone, we searched backwards through her entire blog, and found the first reference was November 20, 2009. Although we thoroughly enjoyed the research (she says douche-canoe a lot), it didn’t seem appropriate to link to that blog post, so we linked to her blog. Without explaining why we did so, it looked like we were calling her a douche-canoe.
No way. Jenny is awesome. Read her blog, and you’ll see why everyone loves her. It’s not just us.
PS: Jenny isn’t the one who thought we called her a douche-canoe. It was @jackassletters, to whom we owe a debt of gratitude. We don’t want to do anything that might make Jenny feel stabby.
Chill out, it’s only 140 characters
Huge, monumental, world-changing event today. In case you haven’t heard, Steve Jobs quit his job at Apple. Millions of Apple fanatics are in despair, and yet, the world still revolves on its axis.
Why should you care? We’re trying to find a reason, and it escapes us. Yeah, he did some pretty amazing things with computers, and we love computers almost as much as our family, okay, sometimes way more than our family, but it’s just computers.
One of those lost souls (who we were following, who was following us) waxed poetic in an endless stream of tweets about the hero, Steve Jobs. We responded with “Comparing innovation to the people who put their life on the line? Steve Jobs is no hero.” And then, the dude totally lost it. (We’re not posting the actual tweets here, because we don’t have enough money to pay for his therapy.) He complained about being attacked by strangers on twitter, and said (even though he has nearly 50,000 tweets) “this is why I don’t post on twitter very often.” (cue laughter)
Seriously, dude, get over it. Your announcement that you’re thinking of leaving twitter is so Stephen Fry. Whining until your followers (who think you’re somebody important because you have a lot of followers, and follow you because you have a lot of followers) begged you not to leave is too emo for words. And then, your post: “I have closed my Twitter account. If you want to follow me, you can now find me at twitterstar.com. Thank you.” while you continue to post on twitter, is downright pathetic.
We’ll stop picking on Steve Job’s love child for a moment and focus on the big picture, because we see this happen all the time.
The truth of the matter is… it’s only 140 characters. Unless you’re a professional copywriter with a couple of Masters Degrees (Hi Susan!) or have written, edited, rewritten, reviewed, and rewritten that tweet again before posting it, there’s a 99.9999999% chance someone, and most likely lots of someones, will misunderstand, misconstrue, disagree with, and quote out of context in order to make you look stupid, your simple tweet. There’s just no way to perfectly convey the perfect thought consistently 50,000 times. And to expect that everyone is going to agree with you, understand the deeper meaning you’re trying to convey, and support your every word is absolute lunacy.
It’s just twitter.
If the same words were said face-to-face, you’d hear the inflection, read the body language, and most likely, enter into a conversation. Unless you’re a total douche-canoe. In which case, we’re glad we stopped following you.
Deal with it.
Without a complicated series of emoticons, it’s pretty hard to phrase something in the exact way necessary to make sure everyone is in perfect agreement, and nobody’s feelings are hurt. In fact, it would be pretty boring if we tried to make it so. The misunderstandings and confusion are part of the general chaos that makes twitter so wonderful.
Preserve your little piece of sanity. Step back, switch to Google+ or Facebook, and chill. It’s all just a few words on the screen between people who know each other very superficially. When you come back in 5 minutes or 5 months, twitter will be more or less the same as you left it, and we probably won’t even notice you weren’t there.
And, to Steve Jobs, if you’re reading this (as if): You did a darned good job at that computer company. Your marketing genius turned customers into crazy fans who now can’t even bring themselves to play D&D until they know for sure what you’re going to do next. We should all be so talented, and loved. Good luck dude, and good health.
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