Virtual Event Success

A recent blog post about The Dark Side of Twitter on Marketing Profs got me thinking about this.

Another dark side of Twitter is that tweets aren’t taken in whole, especially when each individual tweet is part of a larger conversation.

How People Misinterpret the Bible

Growing up in a Christian church, many would take passages from the Bible out of context. People would pull one verse out of the Bible to prove their point and end the discussion right then and there.

But if you were to read the 3 or 4 passages before or after that individual verse, you get a totally different meaning.

How Twitter is Like the Bible

Individuals tweets can be taken out of context, just like verses from the Bible. And who can blame anyone. Each individual, 140 character tweet that you publish is indexed as its own individual page in search engines and gets its own URL in Twitter.

Recently, I got into a debate about ghostblogging. It went on for what seemed like hours on Twitter and went around in circles. The debate was between myself, Dave Fleet and Danny Brown.

I enjoyed going back and forth with the 2 gentlemen and stuck to my main argument which is that I see nothing wrong with delegating a task I dislike. Since writing is something I don’t like, I delegate it.

And I do. I delegate the content in my ezine that’s sent out weekly and the content in my training materials. And this is after I audio record my thoughts so that it can be written on paper in my voice.

But I have never outsourced the writing of my blog posts. Call it an ego thing, but my blog is my voice and I just haven’t felt right about outsourcing the text written on my blog.

Although I’ve been writing all the content on my blog since I launched it in 2006, this was called into question when Dave Fleet posted one of my tweets on his blog to show that I do ghostblog my blog. The tweet that I authored said:

how can “ghostblogging” be inauthentic? to me, i outsource the tasks I hate. since writing is one of them, I delegate it #pcto09

However, this individual tweet was part of a larger discussion which can be followed here. It was in reaction to something Danny Brown had said and I used a few tweets to prove my point, including the one above.

However, in trying to prove my point, it appears that I’m contradicting myself.

My Advice?

While debating an issue on Twitter, the collection of your tweets may be missed if one of your individual tweets helps someone prove their point or helps them highlight a contradiction in your argument.

Take the debate off Twitter by writing a blog post so you can elaborate on your key points. Using 140 characters to try and prove your point is like using morse code to debate an issue.

Each social media tool has its role in the conversation. Use Twitter for punchy, pithy information. Use your blog for more elaborate prose. Otherwise, you’ll get into a mess like I have where my points are not taken in whole.

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