This morning I tweeted out this about the EE tariffs for the new 4G services.
Normally I wouldn’t bother about something I’ve tweeted, but for some reason this has been retweeted more times than I care to count and it needs to be corrected. Continue reading
on days like today I hate it with every fibre of my being.
I woke this morning, with the rest of the UK, to the sad news that Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, had died from cancer. Steve had been diagnosed in 2004 with pancreatic cancer, from that point he was on a downward spiral, survival rates for this type of cancer are very low, in fact he was lucky to last as long as he did. If you get diagnosed with pancreatic cancer you normally shuffle off your mortal coils in 6 to 12 months.
So why do I hate Twitter so much today? I hate it because of the herd mentality of people. My timeline was full of people tweeting & retweeting banal tweets usually with #ripSteve in there somewhere. I could live with that but then I started to see tweets like
RT if you have an #apple product #iPhone #iPad #iPod #iMac #iSad #SteveJobs #RIPSteveJobs #thankyousteve
I mean seriously WTF?
And
I’ve been using Apple products to run my business pay my bills and for 15 years #thankyousteve
No numb nuts, you have been using Apple products to make money to buy more Apple products for 15 years.
On the 18th October am I going to see a load of tweets saying
Thank you Thomas, you changed the lives of people around the world for the better #edison
No, I very much doubt it. Steve Jobs founded a company that made many great things but he could not have done any of that without Thomas Edison could he?
The one thing that is missing from the tweets I have used as examples?
Cancer is the important thing in all of this, not your iPhone, iPad or your iWhatfuckingever it’s CANCER you morons. Endlessly retweeting sycophantic crap about how Steve Jobs & Apple changed your life is not doing anything other than proving you are a moron, a brain dead bovine herd following moron.
Do something real and every time you feel the need to retweet how much Steve Jobs changed your life put your hand in your pocket and give a £$€1 to a cancer charity and do something real to help change someone else’s life.
Cancer effects almost everyone, I have two very good friends who are dealing with it right now, either by having it themselves or a close family member having it. I have another good friend who has had cancer, had one of his nuts chopped off and looks like he is ok.
Don’t be a herd following moron, be an individual and do something real that makes a difference give a £$€1 or whatever you can afford to a cancer charity.
Just so you know 21 people a day in the UK die from Pancreatic Cancer.
The irony of this rant is, I wrote it on my iMac and 99% of the people who read it will find out about it via Twitter.
Apple fan boys & girls don’t bother tweeting me, I’m not there today because of you.
Do feel free to leave hate messages below along with a scan of your receipt for your donation to a cancer charity.
I often see @therealgokwan around Digbeth, but today I got on top of him
on the Twitter home page..
I’m gutted that the link was to this story on Hold The Front Page and not to one of mine, ahh well at least Gok Wan will have the memory of the day I got on top of him..
Posted from Birmingham, England, United Kingdom.
I had forgotten about quite a nice tweet exchange from a couple of weeks ago until I saw @Jasonhall tweet a link to this story about someone tweeting about a problem with their mobile phone provider.
A couple of weeks ago Mrs R and I went to London for a wedding. We booked in to The May Fair Hotel, who I now know are also on Twitter as @TheMayFairHotel. As ever and much to my wifes consternation I tweeted and checked in using Gowalla and thought no more of it.
After a night out in the big city I checked in on Twitter to see that The May Fair Hotel had seen my tweet and taken the time to respond.
Now as far as I am aware The May Fair Hotel were not following me and were unlikely to know I am a Twitter user, so they are actively searching Twitter for references to their hotel and responding to them. My experience at the hotel was positive so it is quite an easy thing to do but I would imagine given the level of customer care in the hotel generally that they would deal with negative tweets as well, or certainly use them as a conduit for making contact with an unhappy customer and dealing with the issues off-line.
It is hard to imagine that anyone would tweet anything particularly negative about this hotel,
1, it is a very good hotel and nothing was too much trouble.
2, if a guest did have a problem I’m sure they would address it directly with the staff before tweeting something.
A simple lesson is to be learnt from this, if you are going to use twitter in your business for marketing or whatever, make sure you run searches for your brand & keywords. Not all your customers will be following you or even know you exist on Twitter and unless you look for them and what they are saying you can’t hear them..
