What We Talk About When We Talk About Twitter

Notes from a communications crisis

I live in a world of communications and political professionals, helping candidates and causes we believe in deliver messages that motivate voters, donors and democracy activists. Sometimes, we use Twitter.

Well, I don’t use Twitter myself, not much, apart from promoting this newsletter, but I know it’s essential to the communications strategies of my clients and colleagues. This morning a conversation got started on a group of progressive communicators I’m on that included this:

How is your thinking about the role of Twitter as a comms channel for your organization/clients evolving?

With the weekend's news about people resigning from the trust & safety council, we're reviewing our decision to stay. Every time I log onto the app/website, I see more ads from OnlyFans and crypto and it's trashy. I signed up for Post & Mastodon and am watching those, but the process of rebuilding our audience there will be long. 

Isn’t that the problem? If we are going to successfully quit Twitter a single alternative is going to have to emerge where everyone will migrate together. Otherwise, a million Truth Socials will bloom.

I expect that journalists will find a preferred platform for PR people like me to reach them, and everything else will become chum for Elon Musk (HT to @DonnyDeutsch, who I first heard call Musk a Bond villain).

Andy Warhol got it wrong. In the future—in other words, now—everyone will be famous for 15 seconds. So what? How does that change anything? What happens on Twitter stays on Twitter. It doesn’t get 60 votes in the Senate.

Most of the people who live, depend or succeed on Twitter also rely on old-fashioned mainstream media like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

Some of us even still read newspapers in print. You can pry my New York Times from my cold, dead hands.

It’s still going to be the dominant media that sets the agenda, with more and more silos available for those who prefer their news filtered and pre-fit to specific agendas.

Twitter will be a good way to reach journalists and opinion-makers—until it isn’t.

We’ll continue to get our information on our phones, doom scrolling like Mark Meadows while the world blows up on our doorstep—until we don’t.

Then, we’ll find new ways—or maybe old ways—to communicate ideas, engage audiences and motivate people to believe in something, or act to bring about change.

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