Is a 140 Character Text Field an Appropriate Venue for a New Colosseum (Coliseum)?
This is a story about a clash involving a cancer sufferer, a good cause and a couple of celebrities from the old and new media, along with observations made or implied about their values, ethics and that sort of thing. Along the way I got myself briefly caught up on the periphery of the melee, and here’s my take on what transpired.
First, let me declare that not too long ago I qualified as a registered nurse. In fact my very first appointment 3 years ago was to a hospital cancer ward where I spent 8 months in close contact caring for people facing death and all it’s finality.
Here’s the story.
By the time my long-haul airplane landed in Sydney on Nov 11 I was Gary Vaynerchuk’s newest raving fan, having just bought his Crush It! at LAX to read on the way home. Prior to that I had briefly watched an online video of a keynote he delivered, but had never followed him closely. However, his book’s message impacted me so much it wasn’t long before I was monitoring my Twitter feed to devour not only his every tweet but also what others were tweeting about him too.
On Nov 22 @garyvee retweeted this:
“@drew http://milliondollardrew.com (RT if you care about destroying cancer)”
Briefly, the target site said that if you became a follower of Drew Carey (host of CBS’s The Price Is Right) before Dec 31, you would be helping lift the numbers so Drew could donate up to a million dollars to Lance Armstrong’s well known cancer foundation.
Being a guy with an inquisitive mind, I needed more background before carrying out Gary’s recommendation. I learned that cancer sufferer Drew Olanoff (DO) started the whole thing off by announcing an auction of his valuable Twitter 4-letter name @drew with the proceeds going to Livestrong. On Oct 3 his tweets to @DrewFromTV attracted Drew Carey’s (DC) attention. DC entered the auction with an initial $25K bid but eventually upped that to 1 million dollars (in an on-air TV interview) IF his Twitter follower count reached 1,000,000. Anything less than the magical one million, he said, the donation would still proceed on a pro rata basis.
A month or so later Gary Vaynerchuk broadcast news of the challenge to his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. I noticed that one of them took exception to Gary’s action. Although this guy was a newish Twitter user and like me a recent Crush It! fan, he tweeted that he felt it was wrong for Gary to try to push him into following a game show host in that way, saying that he was telegraphing a bad branding message.
That quite directly critical tweet, since removed from the Twitter database (presumably by it’s writer), caught my eye on Nov 22 and initiated my own series of the following 3 tweets on the matter:
1. Collateral damage from Drew Carey’s hasty request: @[username witheld] Gutsy! – giving @garyvee a lesson in legacy & branding http://bit.ly/4ryiQ4 (bad link – tweet removed)
2. Declined a huge China gig. Did @garyvee damage his branding mantra by endorsing a game show host’s impulsive promise? http://bit.ly/4ryiQ4 (bad link – tweet removed)
3. Drew Carey cancer donation affair/fiasco shows twitter’s 140 char’s gives zero scope for explaining motives http://bit.ly/7W6djO
Soon after that, I switched twitter accounts for unrelated reasons. But going back into the old account yesterday I noted 2 “@responses” to me from two of the protagonists.
From Gary: “@StewShaw i am dear friends with @drew” (DO)
From DO: “@StewShaw “impulsive promise” is a pretty impulsive label. @garyvee is an amazing dude and gets what we’re doing.”
Having the extremely busy Gary V specifically respond to my conversation in that way made me realise how easily one can get misinterpreted on Twitter. I don’t think Gary would have read Drew Carey’s selfanalytical version of events, written after the drama had unfolded, too late to undo the appearance of self interest. On Twitter there’s simply not room to fully explain yourself and your motives. And if you do try to explain stuff by sending a succession of tweets, chances are high that doing so will trigger a bunch of unfollows because you are choking their timelines. I know that, because my twittering on Nov 22 caused a guy to write: ” Sorry you flooded my timeline…. no more following!”
Meantime, as mentioned above, DC had been having his own misgivings about the ethics of his million follower Twitter challenge. Following public criticism for what appeared to be a cheap grab for his own publicity at the expense of cancer sufferers, he wrote a couple of introspective blogposts first here and a couple days later added this one, explaining that the whole thing had happened so quickly and he had acted impulsively, but that given another opportunity he would have approached the donation thing in a much more considered manner.
So what have I learned out of all this?
- there’s no substitute for doing proper research into issues – old media rules still apply
- with only 140 characters at your disposal, don’t tweet about stuff that really requires a fuller explanation
- it’s amazing that a single unknown person in Australia can attract the attention of someone so popular and busy as Gary Vaynerchuk
- be careful what you put out on Twitter. Yes, you can later delete your own tweets, but from the instant you sent them in the first place they ramify throughout the twitterverse, and chances are high that someone will read before you delete.
I still think Gary Vaynerchuk is a phenomenon worth following because of his compelling message, genuineness and passionately driven enthusiasm.
And I still think cancer sucks bigtime. For those of us without the disease there’s no way to comprehend it’s full impact on sufferers, and being an ICU nurse puts me closer than most to some truly horrible ways that a person’s health can breakdown. So of course I totally admire what Lance Armstrong is doing for the cancer community. His foundation is not only funding research but more importantly disseminating information that provides sufferers with hope and gives them and their families much needed support.
It’s now just over 6 months since Drew Olanoff (DO) was diagnosed with leukemia, a harrowing period during which that self-confessed geek’s life has been totally turned upside down. He summarized that first month in this guest post on Livestrong’s site. Drew you can beat this thing.
[author's note: Stew Shaw's new twitter username is @StewNoBS]
