Survival of the Shortest: What Darwin Taught me about Tweeting and Twitter
HMS Beagle courtesy of Wikipedia
There are very few tweeting, blogging, marketing, and communicating via social media channels who don’t believe the customer experience through social channels is here to stay. Increasingly, however, the character traits of tweets on twitter get worn in, worn down and they begin to evolve into something fresh and new. How did we get to the latest twitter etiquette from whence we came? Let’s start with a look back at a brief history of, well, how we tweet and microblog – and watch and learn from Darwin along the way.
Public Relations; Let’s face it – your first tweets had an element of your product, your service or something as self-serving as your company’s last press release. But enough was enough and in order to move up a notch in Darwinian expanse of social, you needed to remove your shameless promotion and product-specific information and think different.
Hashtags; When you first used twitter, you may have used one hashtag, or left out hashtags altogether. Then – you evolved your hashtag use to reflect the significant topics that thought leaders and infleuncers were using. You tried one. #score! More and more social tools would identify you and you were added to influenctial twitter lists, dailies like Paper.li, and through the natural order of things, you moved ahead and gained followers.
Retweets; You assembled the tribe and shared your new communication system – “please retweet” – and then one by one, the peers you had contacted, retweeted your message. Like the crew as when Darwin anchored “The Beagle” in the Galapagos – you’d landed, and the more retweets you had, the more influence. But natural selection as it is, meant that the least valued trait would become short lived, and too many retweets became white noise and annoying.
Links and Attachments; As with samples that Darwin brought back home to England, evidence of what you’re tweeting is worth the effort – sharing more than your words – pictures, links and videos made your message more powerful.
Thought Leadership; A term @Rwang0 uses in front of all of his original thoughts – ‘MyPOV’ evolved out of microblogging at events and during sessions. As an example, at the #SAPsummit this week in Boston, those influencers and ambassadors microblogging at the event helped those not in the room to “hear” what was discussed and communicated. And beyond this type of reporting, MyPOV or ^MH will differentiate an original thought from a spoken one. And this takes us nearly up to the present day.
So what does Darwin have in store next for social media? Well, for one, he encountered rough seas, disease, dangerous animals and complicated personal interactions with his crew on the Beagle. Some of that – as with social media – goes with the territory.
Still, he saw the past – from a distance and up close – and synthesized from where we came to where we are. Learning from your timeline of tweets can do the same for you. Don’t get complacent. Test, try and watch closely, learn from the best you see. Then imagine what else is possible.
