What’s Up With That Guy?

UPDATE: The smart ass ending of this blog post was clearly misunderstood and like many things, as this has aged I question the intelligence of this blog post. I'm going to leave it to remind me, if you are just criticizing someone else's gig you are NOT necessarily doing anything youself. I.E. you are disreqarding my productivity rule No. 1 "If you aren't filling time, you're killing time." I do want to end with an old Italian proverb which says "only a friend will tell you when you have something on your face." Which I believe is what I was kind of going for.

Original Post>>>>>>>>

Full disclosure: earlier in my life I went through a Guy Kawasaki fan boy phase. I can clearly remember chasing him down at a printing equipment show in Atlanta to get him to autograph a copy of his book “How to Drive Your Competition Crazy”. So I’m not void of emotions like a Vulcan when I write this blog.

So I installed TweetDeck and was learning how to use it. I highly recommend TweetDeck by the way if nothing else it’s a good example of what Adobe flash programming can do. Part of the TweetDeck features is that it recommends people at random for you to follow. One of the people that flashed on my screen was former Mac evangelist Guy Kawasaki. I’m not sure why but I’ve always liked Guy, and I think I’ve bought all of his books though I don’t thing I’ve ever actually read a single one. Anyway I felt confident I could actually read 140 characters generated by Guy Kawasaki at a time. Especially if they followed tweeter etiquette and represented the occasional, personal, insight into how Guy sees the world.

So I was a little surprised…wait…make that really surprised, when over the next 45 minutes I received no less than 15 tweets from Guy Kawasaki all with pithy small mind digestible slug lines and a bit.ly compressed URL pointing to a page on his Alltop site. It only took me about 10 minutes to realize I was going to have unfollow Guy. While I was trying to figure out where all the compressed links went I dug around a little bit on Alltop, which is YACAS (yet another content aggregation site).

One thing I did find that I’ve found interesting was an article by Guy on the Art of the Repeat Tweet. In it Guy Kawasaki explains why his tweets (which as it turns out are not really his tweets after all) are frequent and repeat. Guy has timed his repeats 8 hours apart with each tweet being sent three times. He repeats his tweets because he found he gets as many clicks on the second and third as he does on the first tweet. What he doesn’t really mention is, but is clearly in the subtext, that he doesn’t want to tell you anything - he’s just wanting to get you to click on the links. I.E. for him as a social marketer, tweet is just a traffic building tool.

There’s a couple of things the trouble me deeply about the strategy.

First, the golden rule of new marketing is that you have to bundle something of value in with the message. If you’re not going to give something away that’s useful to your audience with your communications they’re going to ignore you. Being ignored can be good but ultimately it’s a lot less satisfying than being the center of attention.

Second, and this is the one that really bakes my cookies, Guy has a secondary tweeter account called @Alltop that post these spamlike links just once. He encourages people that hate the repeats to follow it instead. What really flips me out about this is Alltop is a brand that may come and go but Guy will be Guy Kawasaki forever. So maybe Guy’s forgotten that he is his own brand. And while he may be pimping out his new venture, he is surely chipping away at his eternal one which is his own credibility. After snooping around Alltop, I’d say that’s not a good trade. Yawn.

Let’s face it, if you’re a man in the middle, meaning you are not generating the original content or you do not control the channel through which it disseminates, you got nothing except your sense of humor or your good looks to distinguish you from 10,000 competitors who are competing for the same eyeballs. When you’re deciding what’s signal and what noise is, you’ll definitely be noise.

Now Guy Kawasaki can a probably afford to be that (for a little while anyway). Let’s face it though the top spots in content aggregation are taken and for the time being they don’t look like they’re going to be dethroned any time soon. Nonetheless I wish Alltop all the best in their venture (Annie should just post more tofurkey pics).

I would like to offer a new name for what Guy Kawasaki is doing. I think I’ll call it “Social Persistent Alltop Marketing”.

Guy is pretty unapologetic about his strategy. He suggests to me that if I can’t handle it that I should just unfollow him and have a nice day.

That sounds like a plan to me Guy. You have a nice day too. Oh and if you want to buy my signed copy of “How to Drive the Competition Crazy” it’s on eBay.