90% Of Everything Is Crap
The other day I was killing some time online and discovered a blog post referencing Sturgeon’s law. Sturgeon’s law states that 90% of everything is crap. Behind this generalisation is a really interesting concept for me, it’s a pretty solid truism that with any democratised medium, the lowest common denominator will stamp its way to the fore and make the most easily accessible environs of the medium suck.
Lots of words there, not an awful lot to get your teeth into, so let’s take a real world example of a totally democratised medium. Twitter.
Something we come upon time and again at Crowd is that certain people don’t ‘get’ Twitter. This doesn’t mean that some baffled MD has just decided on a whim to get some of this new product called ‘social media’ and spread a thin layer of it onto their business, in fact they have often spent significant effort in visiting Twitter on a daily basis for some time, trying to understand how they could leverage it to improve customer relations and brand image. Yet after all of this research, they often cannot understand where the value would lie for their own brand development strategy.
The reason that the disconnect exists is because unless you try to truly engage with Twitter on an individual level, it’s very difficult to see how it could have any value whatsoever.
Tweens and Teens
It’s 2012 and as part of one of my roles, I have to look at twitter as a corporate entity every day. Each day I review the top 10 trending topics across the UK. Each day 90% of those are crap.
“Ahhh, but how do you define crap?” you might ask. Joyfully I don’t need to. These trends are as close to the objective definition of being utterly useless to the entire world as you can really get. As an interesting experiment, I won’t tell you what the trends currently are, visit twitter now and see what’s trending and I am relatively sure you’ll see the same patterns.
- Pattern 1: A massive number of tweens and teens, using endless retweets to push their current celebrity obsession (in 2012 this is either Justin Beiber or the one of the various Xfactor products)
- Pattern 2: A massive number of tweens and teens, using endless retweets to push their current movie obsession (in 2012 this is usually Harry Potter, in 2011 it was twilight)
- Pattern 3: A small snippet of movie news such as the confirmation that a certain actor or director will be associated with a sequel of a movie
- Pattern 4: A massive number of tweens and teens, who believe that they are in a different set to those pushing patterns 1 and 2, and are using an ironical meme to rebel against the mainstream (ReplaceSongnameWithFart – for an example)
- Pattern 5: You have to be very careful not to miss these, but every now and again a worthy cause for commemoration or discussion will briefly flash up around spot 8 or 9
The Daily Mail for the entirely enfranchised youth
So what are we saying? Basically Twitter is the Daily Mail for the entirely enfranchised youth. A digital tabloid of worthless opinion and dangerous ignorance.
But the thing is, it’s not.
Remember Sturgeon’s law and apply it. 90% of everything on Twitter is so far beyond crap it could make you wonder why anyone would every choose to engage with this medium, let alone why it is such a revolutionary part of modern life. With that in mind, and somewhat ironically, it’s not until you do make the conscious decision to actually engage with Twitter, that its value becomes so apparent.
#JRHartley
Take the same MD of the same company that we alluded to in our opening paragraph. Ask him to stop trying to work out what Twitter ‘is’ from the outside and to forget any notion of using it to generate revenue or improve brand awareness. Instead get him to set up a personal account, ask him what he’s interested in (say Fly Fishing), nudge him towards following 4 or 5 influential people in that area of interest, and leave him to mess about for a few weeks. Allow him to delve more deeply into that 10% or 5% or 2% of twitter that is actually of relevance to him, and save yourself the hassle of trying to explain why Twitter is an amazing thing. Allow the medium to sell its self. With luck he’ll be back to you before the month is out evangelising more effectively than you ever could, and extolling the benefits of ‘Cabela’s 24-Piece Copper John Assortment’ over ‘Rainy’s 10-Piece CF Baitfish Fly’, on a more overcast day – because @IKetchMany in Canada has told him so.
Job done.
Unless you understand your objective, it’s not possible to implement policies that support it. Unless you understand your medium, it’s not possible to effectively advocate it to your organisation.
Do you tweet? If not, why not? You might think that Twitter has nothing to offer you unless you’re a fan of Justin Bieber, or keen to discover what Ron Weasley ate for breakfast; but if you are interested in… well… anything, then don’t be afraid to stick a toe in the water. You might just find yourself in your very own 10% of gold dust before you realise what’s going on.