Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Would you please, please, please, please, please, please, please stop tweeting?

05.19.2009 by David Murray // 4 Comments

I continue follow Neville Hobson on Twitter for the same reason why I often follow a slow-moving truck on the freeway: There's a certain bovine comfort to it.

Neville, a U.K.-based communication consultant, issued 40 Twitter tweets on one recent day. That's about four tweets for every waking hour.

Neville Hobson is tweeting two packs a day.

I don't know how he does it any more than I know why he does it.

Most of Neville's posts are links to articles and web sites of interest to him and his communication followers, and I understand why he shares them.

But why is he clogging up the Twittersphere with these kind of posts:

"Morning!"

"Now heeding calls to pay attention to family things as I promised I would today 🙂 See you later!"

"At the gate, boarding flight EDI to LHR soon."

"FedEx guy just came. As a result I noticed that the doorbell battery needs replacing :)"

"At desk after
dinner, away an hour, 3 missed calls on mobile. None with caller ID and
none left message. Ok, so what do you want from me?"

"Time for a bite with some rioja."

I've actually asked Neville about his Twitter philosophy before and
received such a vague response that I'm discouraged to try again.
(Neville and I are techno frenemies; we've found one another engaging
in person and yet confound each other online.)

However, I will let him know I've posted this and see if he'll weigh in here on the question: Don't
you worry that if everybody tweets every time they fart, Twitter will
become an even more overwhelming clusterfuck than it is now?

Whatever Hobson's Twittering excesses, at least they are his own.

Did you know the social media empressario Guy Kawasaki actually hires this person to "ghost tweet" for him? That's probably why Kawasaki has issued 24,590 Tweets since joining Twitter, as compared to Hobson's paltry 18,539.

Neville
Hobson and Guy Kawasaki—at the precise moment that I've finally come to
see Twitter's social utility, why are you trying to ruin it for
everyone by tweeting too much?

Categories // Uncategorized

Comments

  1. Jill Vitiello says

    May 19, 2009 at 10:11 pm

    David, great post. In talking today with one of my colleagues about the lure of Twitter, he said: “I don’t give a Tweet!” Will the pendulum swing in this direction because of the inanity of so many Twitter users’ updates?

    Reply
  2. David Murray says

    May 20, 2009 at 2:16 pm

    I have no idea, and Neville’s no help; he wrote me on Twitter yesterday,
    “thrilled to know I’m a bovine comfort to you, David 🙂 Back to your post once I can think of something ridiculous to say!”
    And then nothing.
    The man marches to the Tweet of his own drummer.

    Reply
  3. Jill says

    May 29, 2009 at 4:57 pm

    I’ve unfollowed people for the crime of having too much to tweet… and been unfollowed for the same.

    Reply
  4. Peter Brill says

    May 30, 2009 at 12:30 pm

    Great article and I’m sooo glad I’m not the only one! A while ago I asked for comment via Twitter, and got…. Strangely enough, there were some familiar names amongst my list of followers and yours! So, I felt I too had to blog about my similar frustrations. Naturally, I sent an automatic Tweet to let everyone know I’d done it!!
    It will be great when people stop being on transmit and start thinking about receiving. I no longer follow people who have 27,578,976 other followers. Gaming the system isn’t what Twitter or any other social media is supposed to be about.

    Reply

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