March 31, 2009

Guy is a fraud, when it comes to spouting off about Twitter as a marketing tool. The man says numbers don't matter, and then in the same breath (I believe at the keynote in question) he says that they do. Then he talks about making the experience personal when he has other people running his account.

It's a shame the tech world is so unwilling to step up and say their idols are not perfect.

Guy is not perfect, but he isn't a fraud. I've known him since the early 1990s when he was a columnist for MacUser and I was the director of corporate communications at Ziff-Davis, which published the magazine. He told the SES New York audience how he was using Twitter -- without deception. You may not approve of the tricks he uses to increase traffic to Alltop, but he was straightforward and honest during his explanation of what he is doing with Twitter. He reminds me of Penn & Teller, the eccentric magicians who tell you how they are going to trick you -- and then still pull off the trick. Ironically, Penn Jillette was also a columnist for PC Computing, which was also published by Ziff-Davis. The job of these columnists was to discomfort the comfortable. They continue to do this today -- in new media.

Guy may be an idol in the tech industry, but that doesn't mean you should follow the man like a blind man. The key here is you should make you own path. If you don't like his tactics, great. If you do, that's great too. I don't really get this whole idolizing thing. We just love to worship people, don't we? :)

Panah, I agree. I don't plan to use many of the tricks that he shared at SES New York, but there are a couple of the tools that he mentioned that I will probably use, too. So, I don't idolize Guy. But I do listen to what he has to say and try to learn a thing or two. And his earlier book, "The Macintosh Way," was full of great advice -- so I'll cut him a little slack about his Twitter tricks.

Kawazaki might be a fraud, but I don't have to care: he turned out to be so annoying that I had to unfollow him. Anything important that he says (or repeates, rather) is mentionned by someone else.

Digital economics make most information a commodity, and parrots won't win in the long term.

The question isn't whether Guy Kawasaki is a fraud or an honest magician, the question is whether the way he is using Twitter is providing value for him while reducing the value of Twitter. While Andrew stops short of calling Guy's tactics parasitic marketing, I will not. Guy is gaming the system for his own benefit, creating virtual blight on twitter and teaching others to do the same. For every dollar these spammers manage to extract from the Twitterverse, the value of Twitter is likely to drop by $100.

Andrew summed it up very well:

So why do I think that he could singlehandedly ruin Twitter, if its brand, community, and technology aren't robust enough? I think mostly about how a fashion-forward digital brand can be reduced to a sort of flea market image, just by the actions and presence of a prevalence of certain kinds of members. When that happens, eventually the value declines (think eBay) and the cool kids start scouting around for somewhere that isn't overrun by hawkers and pitchmen and auto-generated babble.

Andrew mentions eBay, but anyone remember GeoCities? Does anyone still use a Hotmail address for business? Remember when MySpace owned the top 10 for query volume and traffic? The list of sites devastated by ploys of spammers and ponzi scheme building con men is depressing.

Finally, I am just sick of the time suck from wading through hundreds of Zombie Followers who show up each month. Twitter is a fun little water cooler that provides a very rapid way to spread news, gossip, trivia and a lot of catty remarks. I don't want to spend my time filtering through false friends just because some one thinks that is it OK to piss in our pool.

Jonah, I agree with you. If we critique Guy's Twitter tactics, that's constructive. Twitter is a new social medium and its worth establishing best practices -- just as they needed to be established by other social media. By the way, I remember GeoCities, I still have a Hotmail address for business, and I experimented with MySpace until I set up a page on Facebook instead. What I've learned is that we need to focus on the people instead of the technology. That's why spam is a bad thing -- no matter which media you use. It abuses your access to people. That's wrong no matter what new trick technology can do.

After watching and hearing Guy speak at SES NY, I have to agree that at the minimum, Guy was being authentic in how he uses Twitter. Like he said, just unfollow him if you're sick of his Twitter spam. I came away from his presentation having learned about a bunch of new Twitter tools that can be used effectively for clients. I hate SPAM as much as the next person but twitter does have marketing properties that makes it extremely useful to those who choose to use it in this fashion.

I second the motion, Byron.

I can't resist jumping in here. I think what made this interesting was seeing Guy in conjunction with the other keynote of the week, John Gerzema who wrote "The Brand Bubble."

John's keynote was almost an exact opposite of what Guy was promoting.

Guy was about getting the most Twitter followers possible.

John was about offering real value to your customers.

I must say, I feel like Guy's approach seems like a hangover from pre-2008 recession.

An excellent observation, Sage. The two keynotes were at opposite ends of the marketing spectrum. It's ironic that Guy's got all of the publicity, because John's had a ton of valuable insights.

While Mr Kawasaki posts links to his alltop.com almost every time he tweets, you will find that he also provides quite a bit of information and links to other sites. Usually, I follow the links to these other sites because that's where the information is.

The links to his alltop.com are usually just secondary to remind you that you can get more info about the tweeted subject from alltop.

I would probably do the same if I was running an online magazine rack like his. He is using twitter to provide value and build his brand along the way.

I'm headed to SES Toronto -- and there's a Twitter session tomorrow afternoon. We may hear some updates on the spam versus marketing debate. Stay tuned.