#Are #You #Sick #And #Tired #Of #Tweets #That #Look #Like #This?
If you are too, you’re onto a trend I’ve been wondering about for many a moon: social media is becoming less and less personal, and a lot of it is starting to seem as artificial and contrived as old media ever was.
The hashtag meme is a perfect example. Initially designed to serve a useful purpose by aggregating tweets around conferences, it’s now the hallmark of super-optimized tweetage brought to you by the social media expert/maven/guru/douchebag.
Today, it’s not uncommon to see six or seven hashtags attached to a perfectly pedestrian tweet announcing a new blog post or press release. Somewhere along the line, hashtags even became substitutes for ordinary words and phrases (“developments in #Iran”… “Is Obama doing enough to combat the #oilspill?”). This is ostensibly so that they’ll be discoverable in Twitter searches, although native Twitter search does just fine searching for “Iran” or “oil spill.”
Even if there are valid reasons to use hashtags prolifically, I usually don’t, for a simple reason: the thing social media lets you do better than any other media is show your true self. There is little room for contrivance in 140 characters. And filling up half your tweets with hashtags makes you look kind of silly, more concerned about optimizing the delivery of your message than about the content of the message itself.
Sadly, this is a lesson that’s been lost on most politicians. True, we don’t automatically expect political leaders to let their hair hang out on Facebook or give us their unfiltered thoughts on Twitter, but it seems that we were doing a lot better in this department a year or two ago than we are now. When Rep. John Culberson became the first member of Congress to tweet himself, it was considered extraordinary. He was quickly followed by @SenJohnMcCain, much maligned during the campaign for not using a Blackberry, with his own personal tweets.
This personal, direct use of Twitter is being slowly replaced by hashtag-laden posts pushing the same old broadcast messages by staff. There are still exceptions of course, and given what a great traffic driver it is, good reasons to push your web content on Twitter. But the killer app of social media for busy, high-profile people is that it lets them show who they are as human beings without the time commitment inherent in doing tons of video or longer-form writing.
In a political realm desperate for authenticity, social media seemed to usher the era of the “real-time representative” who could reply and collaborate with followers in the moment. Instead, some of the biggest social media mavens in Congress seem to have lost interest judging by their number of recent tweets.
For instance, take @ClaireCMC (Sen. Claire McCaskill):
BTW, here’s Congressman Culberson’s last tweet, from May 4th:
And @SenJohnMcCain:
(Kudos to Senator McCain for at least keeping up the pace, though in both his case and McCaskill’s, I want me some of what was going around Congress in March 2009, the peak of political Twittermania.)
So, what happened?
In fairness, much political social media has migrated over to Facebook with the growth of political fan pages, its larger base of users, and the ability to post photos and videos inline. Many politician Twitter feeds are now simply receptacles for their Facebook feeds, with their cut-off status messages and fb.me URLs. And Facebook is an especially good place to get personal with your content, whereas Twitter remains (politically, at least) more of a debating society for politicos.
Is it any wonder then that whenever someone posts something compelling and personal on Facebook, it automatically gets exponentially more likes and comments than a transparently political post? There’s a lesson there. Social media is really personal media. Social Personal media eschews broadcast, and conventional political messages don’t work online (whether they didn’t ever work offline, and we just didn’t know it because we didn’t have metrics like YouTube videos, Facebook likes, and retweets, is very much an open question).
To get elected, you not only need to show you’re right on the issues. You need to show you’re a human being who is actively engaged with the average’s voters concerns. Each and every single time in the modern era, when a Presidential election could be characterized as a personality battle between Warm and Cold, Warm has won.
Social media can be the perfect venue to convey that, and being less political and more personal in your tweets and Facebook posts is a great place to start. But with the explosion of “social media experts,” ghost-tweeters, optimization tips and tricks like hashtags and complex follow-then-unfollow schemes (don’t ask), we risk losing the whole point of social media — the personal dimension.
Think back to the Old Spice guy. There were lots of great things about that campaign you won’t necessarily try at home, but at its core was a high degree of personal engagement delivered with more than a touch of humor. The act of trading a personalized YouTube response for incoming tweets was an inventive combination that challenged the conventional bounds of social media. The interaction with the audience was superbly well done.
It’s cliche, and try telling it to a metrics-obsessed campaign manager, but it really isn’t about the number of people following you or “liking” you, particularly when you can just follow enough people or buy enough Facebook ads to get the numbers you want. It’s about the degree of personal interaction with the audience that you can inspire through these medium, and the halo effect that will surround you and the rest of your campaign as a result.
