I Am Afraid Of Ghosts: Guy Kawasaki And The Dilution Of Social
I read the recent interview with Guy Kawasaki at Iampaddy and I was saddened to read his thoughts on ghostwriting on Twitter:
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.
[…]
there are two people who tweet on my behalf. One, @amoxcalli, is a grandmother in LA who has an exquisite eye for the interesting and controversial. She adds about five tweets per day. The other is @billmeade. He is the best beta tester of books that I have ever met. I wish he would do more, but he does about one tweet every two days or so.
My response is that just stating that the Twittosphere is a meritocracy, and the cream rises, etc., does not justify ghostwriting. There is a really important difference if the CEO writes those particular words himself, even if his grammar is bad.
In essense, Guy is saying that when you see something under his byline on the web may not be actually penned by him. He is more like Newsweek than a person, and that’s ok, but should be made very very clear.
From my perspective, his personal identity has been hollowed out into a brand, like Colonel Sanders or Aunt Jemima: there may not be a person there at all.
But don’t worry, he says, its the content that matters: content is king.
Uh, sorry, Guy. Content isn’t king, except to media mogul types who are invading the edge. 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. People.
Don’t get me wrong. People will buy into his rap, like Dave Fleet who suggests that Guy has defused the issue by disclosing it and adding his ghost writers to his Twitter profile. Fleet says he is uncomfortable with the unexamined ethics involved, but thinks its ok.
Today the NY Times weighed in, clumping Kawasaki with other ghosting celebs, like 50 Cent and Britney Spears. I am sure that their motives are in alignment with Kawasaki’s — they just want the best content to get out there under their names:
[from When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May Be Lurking - NYTimes.com by Noam Cohen]
An unabashed user of ghost Twitterers is Guy Kawasaki, a new-media consultant with more than 80,000 followers, who is full of praise for the two employees who enliven his Twitter feed, often posting updates while he is on stage addressing a conference.
“Basically, for 99.9 percent of people on Twitter, it is about updating friends and colleagues about how the cat rolled over,” he said. “For a tenth of a percent it is a marketing tool.”
Annie Colbert, a 26-year-old freelance writer from Chicago who is one of Mr. Kawasaki’s ghost Twitterers, said she judged her performance based on how often her postings for Mr. Kawasaki are “retweeted,” that is, resent by other users of Twitter.
Recently, she said, she had a coup when the actor Ashton Kutcher repeated her post about a YouTube video showing someone getting high from a “natural hallucinogen.”
“Facebook is like ‘Cheers,’ where everyone knows your name,” she said. “Twitter is the hipster bar, where you booze and schmooze people.”
She said she had been considering trying to get other ghost Twitter clients. “I don’t think I could ghost Twitter for 100 people,” she said. “More like 10 clients. I think I would have to get to know them.”
Personally, I am prepared for the incursion of the media circus into Twitter. It’s what has happened to the blogosphere, and it may be good for the world as a whole. I think it is.
However, just a few guidelines, so we can all know what is ghosted or not:
- Please disclose that your identity is not personal. I think it’s messy that an individual — Guy Kawasaki, for example — creates a Twitter account that looks like others — @guykawasaki — but is actually a media machine. It would have been better if he had created something that looked like a corporate identity, like JetBlue and others have done. @kawasakiinc or something.
- We should adopt a convention (introduced by Cotweet, I think) that posts authored by employees of a corporate account, contributors in group twitter accounts or ghost writers working for machines like @guykawaski should indicate their authorship with their initials. For example, a post by Annie Colbert on @guykawasaki might read
I think that Noah Cohen nails the ghosting issue http://bit.ly/5uAhP ^AC
- (Note to Twitter: Please make a distinction between individuals and machines in the future. A source of revenue, perhaps?)
- Put the identities of your crew in the Twitter profile, like Kawasaki has done. Transparency and openness people.
These things will counter the dilution of social media that is coming from this commercialization of identity, but not completely. Something is lost, here.
I will leave the final words on this subject to one of my heroes, Groucho Marx:
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
