Okay, I promise. Just one more little colorless opus on social media and then I’ll go back to talking about poop and taking pictures of my kids wearing Things That Aren’t Hats on their heads. Today the topic is Twitter, a machine that is all at once an ego boost and a free trip back to high school.
Initially, I didn’t quite get the appeal of Twitter. I am one hell of a wordy girl. My sighs are longer than 140 characters. Frankly I only started tweeting to help drive traffic to this blog, but then something happened and I started really using it. I finally understood what all the fuss was about. According to my husband, I’ve even developed a Twitter-related look that surfaces every time something even mildly noteworthy happens in our home or lives. Whenever I get Twitter Face, he says, “Oh God. You’re going to tweet that, aren’t you?” It’s sort of a delayed warning system, so more often than not I’m already typing.
One of the more exciting side effects of a Twitter obsession for me has been the opportunity to “talk” directly to businesses and brands. My list is small, but Twitter is a great place to get openly gushy when I really like a product, I’ve gotten stellar customer service, or I’ve tried something new and loved it. Many brands don’t necessarily “follow back”, but will respond to tweets (particularly when they’re being twitched about…See what I did there?). For this reason I was rather giddy a while ago when one of my favorite brands followed me back. I noticed that they follow a lot of us little people, and thought that was equally cool. Yesterday, they unfollowed me.
In the years since high school I’ve worked hard to develop my ability to brush things off, not take them personally. Or so I thought. I get that the Internet is a mean place and not everyone is going to like me. Yet, it just so happens that this is a brand that pretty much follows everything back but the porn ads. I couldn’t really avoid the message: We don’t even want people to know you like us. We have no problem with “unfollow” ringing in your ears every time you’re in the grocery store and you’re choosing between our product and someone else’s.
I can be big on massaging my inner masochist. All day I’ve been internally reviewing my online activities, wondering what could have made me so repellent. It’s much ado over one unfollow up in here. Maybe I swear too much, I thought, or maybe it was the tweet where I kinda sorta complained about a giant vet bill and made reference to my dog being on cocaine. 140 characters may not seem like a lot, but maybe it’s just enough to make someone look like a horrible person. The truth is, I often try to use humor as a salve when it comes to dealing with difficult things about my kids and my pet and my life in general. That night I felt like a crappy dog owner for not prioritizing the concerns that led to that monster vet bill, and telling the Internet I was about to offer her a glass of wine was my admittedly poor attempt to ease my worry and laugh about it.
Though I am reticent to give Mitt Romney credit for much of anything, perhaps he was right when he said that corporations are people too. I have no way of knowing what made the person manning the Twitter feed at Favorite Brand click me out of the picture, but maybe I’ve learned another important social media lesson: Think twice, tweet once.
Editing doesn’t have to mean self-censorship, and is far better than misrepresenting oneself accidentally on purpose. No, I really can’t enjoy writing or be authentic if I’m constantly wondering whether or not I will come off as an ass. Given how socially awkward I can be, I’m fairly sure that I do indeed come off as an ass a lot of the time. The big difference is that one on one, in real life, I will probably get the opportunity to redeem myself somewhat in coversations lasting longer than five minutes. Twitter can be that short interaction you never get to smooth over, like the time some guy tried to sell me a poster out of his trunk and I thought he asked why I looked familiar. I ended up saying, “I work right over there”, which is a perfectly normal response to, “Do you want to buy a poster?”
I recently met someone who described her first three months on Twitter as “going somewhere to talk to herself”. I can relate to that feeling as I head into my third month of Twitter use, still learning the ropes. My latest rope? I’m definitely not talking to myself.
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