Writing Boots

Close Boots readers will recall that a little more than a month ago Seth Godin linked to a blog item of mine and sent my readership through the roof, from the daily hundreds well into the thousands, where they remained—briefly—before plummeting back into the hundreds.
It's hard to tell it from this graph, but thanks to that episode I've retained about 100 more daily visits than I had before.

I'm working on a plan that I hope will boost the readership again without Waiting for Godin. I'll let you know how, or if, it works. Why? Because as modern communicators we're all in this fucked-up build-your-readership-yourself game together.

I think I may have discovered something gross. Working for an organization in the midst of a public crisis—I can't reveal the organization's identity, lest the crisis deepen if anyone finds out they've hired a tramp like me as a consultant—I search Twitter to see what people are saying about their issue.

Thus, I cut sideways through everybody's little Folllowing/Followers club, seeing a cross-section of Twitter—just whatever people are saying about this particular issue.

And what do I find?

A lot of identical tweets—same smart-ass remark, same peculiar grammar and punctuation, same everything.

What the Holtz is going on here? Is this "astrotwitter," a new form of astroturfing? And if so, how do the creepy astrotwits initiate the campaign—how do they get people to post this 140-character boilerplate, misleading their followers into thinking it's their original thought? And if it spreads—like "ghosttwittering" appears to be doing—what are the implications for Twitter as a place for organic, spontaneous self-expression?

Et tu, Twitter? Is nothing sacred?

First SARS, which became a joke the second we realized we wouldn't all die from it, and now "swine flu," which sounds like a nickname for a hangover.

"Is he really sick, or does he just have a case of the 'swine flu'?"

Do we live in an age so embarrassing to history that even our pandemics sound ironic?