twitter fail blog

Today’s Guest Post is by our good friend @stinginthetail. She’s is a writer, blogger, singer/songwriter, and  genuinely nice person, even if, by her own admission she is The Queen of Darkness.

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This is my first ever guest post – Tweet Fail asked me around the middle of last year, and i’ve only just got it together. It’s very exciting and i’ve got the Twitterati to help make it go with a bang….

Let’s start with Guy Kawasaki, who deserves a visit from the Fail Bird. He doesn’t really get Twitter. I thought this last year when i blogged about unfollowing him. I offer proof, something he tweeted at me yesterday (10th January 2010 my time), in reply to something i said…

GuyKawasaki:@stinginthetail This explains what you can do: http://holykaw.alltop.com/the-art-of-the-repeat-tweet (not linked on principle)

But Mr Kawasaki, (or the minions who tweeted the above for him), I wasn’t asking for your assistance, quite the opposite. I was expressing my contempt for your lack of Twitter savvy while putting yourself forward as some kind of internet tech guru with your finger on the pulse of the world. What i said was…

stinginthetail:why i unfollowed GK RT @detlef_c RT @smallbiztrends “Repeat your tweets” says @GuyKawasaki. CNN repeats their news every hour. #opences #CES

For those not that familiar with Twitter, i was retweeting something the rather excellent @detlef_c RT’d, and adding my own comment – “why i unfollowed GK“. I unfollowed Guy Kawasaki because so much of his tweetstream was repeated, with no warning that posts were something he tweeted previously. I blogged about following then unfollowing him at the time – i also didn’t like that he wasn’t actually running his own account, but leaving it for assistants to do.

Now, to be honest, i do retweet my blog or things i think are insanely important. But i say “for those who missed it earlier” or “this is a re-retweet” or words to that effect. With my blog, I quote a little bit, in case they forget they’ve read it – “the post with bacon and sharks“. But what GK doesn’t get, as he justifies himself with saying CNN does it – is that CNN is boring – they repeat nothing, over and over. It’s news taken to the level of “sad”. I don’t get why GK thinks boring us the way CNN do is okay.

Guy Kawasaki says (on the post he/minions sent me to)….

“if you hate the repeat tweets because you are online a lot (could the problem be that you’re on Twitter too much and not that I repeat tweets?) or you don’t follow a lot of people, I have several solutions for you:…”

Ah yes, way to go, Guy, blame the messenger. Let’s have a good swipe at the people who are saying, “Oi, Kawasaki, why are u repeating each tweet at least 3 times with no warning? I click on all of them, because i trust you to send me good stuff to click on!” Note the italics, they’re to highlight that part.

That’s the subtext of their complaints, and mine, (you betrayed my trust!) and telling us that we don’t have enough friends, that we’re twitter junkies or sad internet shut-ins, isn’t really the way to address that. (Funny, that post seems to be by Guy himself, and wow, am i glad i unfollowed that person.)

Me, i am not on Twitter 24:7, but i have a memory – if i click on the same story repeated, i will eventually unfollow that person. GK’s also ignoring that people scroll back in his tweet stream, looking for articles, hoping that some of his moneymaking ability will rub off on them. His twitter is basically like a feed, not like following a real person.

Of course, Guy doesn’t care, he’s rich and really only has to be nice to other rich people who can afford to invest in him and his businesses. Twitter is just to show them he is hip, and has a public. Fans. Look at me, i have fans. *facepalm*

Let’s face it, if people like Britney, Michael Jackson, and OJ Simpson still have loyal fans despite their behaviour, then who in their right mind wants fans – or cares what they say? Guy Kawasaki does suggest one stops following him and follows @alltop – another of his accounts – so you only get one of each tweet.

Me, i just unfollowed. Enough people RT everything GK says, if it’s good, it will get to me – i have excellent people i follow on Twitter. I decided (with help from GK and others) that i was only interested in people who were (a) real and (b) likely to tweet back.

It’s why i stopped following @guykawasaki, @stephenfry, @mrskutcher, (Demi Moore) @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher), and even @eddieizzard. I am not on Twitter to be their fan. To be honest, i don’t do ‘fan’ very well at all. Especially, no matter how much i like your work, I can’t help thinking that if you behave like a twat, i don’t want anything to do with you.

Now, I don’t mind if i follow you and you’re not my best bud, but if i go to the trouble to answer a question, the least you can do (even if you got a thousand tweets on the subject), is to say a group thanks (no names required, just ‘thanks everyone’), but some celebrities don’t even manage that. Guy Kawasaki doesn’t even manage his own tweets, his are minion-tweeted.

Guy Kawasaki may be one of the Twitterati, (he has 200,000+ followers) but I see people every day with tens or even hundreds of thousands of followers, who are just spammers. Some of them are known spam criminals -here’s a convicted Australian spammer with 71,000 followers on Twitter.

Follower numbers on Twitter mean nothing - any bint with a cleavage showing can get 2,000 followers inside a few days, even when the pic is obviously fake. Then “she” hands it over (for a fee) to some sucker of an online marketer who thinks the people attracted by cleavage will be good people to sell to. Erm. Twitter fail.

Don’t assume that because someone is a Twitter celebrity, because others sycophantically retweet everything they say, that they’ll be good to follow. Guy Kawasaki isn’t a good follow. To be honest, if i was going to pick a celeb to follow, i’d go for someone like @Alyssa_Milano – 400,000+ followers, and she tweets her own tweets – not because i’m into her, i’m not – but she tweets at her fans and engages them.

Even with thousands of people saying “Alyssa, Alyssa, look at me, look at me!” she finds time to say things to people, just to be a nice person. One of her favourite games seems to be tweeting at someone who really doesn’t expect her to notice them, and wow, Twitter win, Alyssa. She gets her followers and she keeps them.

I still have two celebrities. Celeb One, she followed me, (I didn’t know she was a celeb, as she is a US one, but i googled her), though she does amuse me, she’s on the edge of the Unfollow Chasm of Doom, because i’ve tweeted several things to her and not got a reply. However, i checked, (search for the person’s @name, you can see what’s being said to them, you may be shocked at how many are tweeting) and several people tweeted at her, at the same time, so fair enough, she gets some more rope.

Celeb Number Two, i followed him. Yes, I’m still following @RealBillBailey (you might know him as Manny, the long-haired bookshop assistant in “Black Books”). Why? I dumped Stephen Fry and Eddie Izzard, fellow funnymen, after all. Well, it’s like this. Bill tweeted back. It was a deep convo about pollution, i commented, he commented back, i nearly died and didn’t know what to say! (Yes, i went all “fan-ny” for a while.) But it meant i’m loyal to him. He’s not even following me, but because he once, months ago, bothered to tweet back, i’m going to give him a lot of time. Besides, he’s funny, interesting, and gives good twitter.

Stephen Fry’s Twitter Fail was covered previously in this blog,  but i must say, i was very disappointed in his behaviour. I’d unfollowed him ages ago, tired of being one of a quarter of a million people nodding and smiling at his every move. He’s now got around 1.2 million followers.  However, I unfollowed him because he was boring- like @brumplum did.

Nobody is allowed to say say that on Twitter, not with Mr Fry’s followers and some of his friends waiting to twitterbash anyone who dares to criticise. It’s the same with Guy Kawasaki. So many people trying to suck up to him, they don’t even see when he’s being a pillock.

So, Guy Kawasaki – Twitter FAIL, mate. Read the tweet before you respond – basic Twittiquette. Don’t bash people who say they don’t like the way you tweet, when it’s your inability to do something simple, like let them know it’s a repeat, that is the problem. Don’t take it personally and then have a spiteful dig back at them. Don’t do a @StephenFry.

Basic common sense really – @guykawasaki’s minions could learn about reading content before one responds.

Funnily, like GK says in his post, i reckon anyone who says they don’t like my tweets can unfollow me – but then i tweet originals, let people know when i’m repeating, and don’t tweet the same thing day after day, so me saying it doesn’t make me sound like a pillock.

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Now that you’ve finished reading this awesome post, follow stinginthetail on twitter, and read her blog. But before you go, please say something nice to her in the comments. Comments are like crack to bloggers. We always want more. And she deserves them.