“If I am going to speak, it will come from me. It’s 140 characters. It’s so few characters. If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you. ” Shaquille O’Neal.
Twitter is the hot social service networking this year, but how social is it really? We’ll if your an ex-Apple executive and VC by the name of Guy Kawasaki, it’s apparently not all that social, because it’s a marketing tool that is best complimented with ghostwriters
“Why does it matter who is doing the tweeting? Either the content is good or not good. I’d rather follow a smart intern tweeting for a CEO than an dumb CEO tweeting for himself or herself. Twitter is great that way: Everybody, no matter who they are, gets 140 characters. Then you have to earn your followers and keep earning their allegiance with every tweet.” Guy Kawasaki
The problem here is that Kawasaki sees Twitter as a content platform vs a social networking platform. Stowe Boyd: “Connectedness is king: it’s social media, right? The social is supposed to equate to real live human beings communicating with each other. Not ‘bots, and ghosts, and things that go bump in the night.”
The New York Times deals with who is using, and not using ghostwriters here .
To quote someone who DM’d me about this yesterday (not sure if I can disclose the name) “why follow guy when we don’t even know when its really him?”
Why indeed.
If it’s good enough for Lance Armstrong, Shaq or Ashton Kutcher to use Twitter directly, why not an ex-Apple executive?
I’d also rather see a poorly written Tweet from a company CEO or celebrity than a polished ghostwritten one if that tweet reflected a real connection, not a canned response. Celebrities are using Twitter to communicate directly with fans, cutting out the middle man and making real connections, but for some, once a tool, always a Twitter fail.
