By and large, I've been amused by the brand impersonator accounts popping up since Musk's half-cooked launch of "Twitter Blue," aka paid verification. The NYTimes shared a nice roundup, including:
- "Verified" Eli Lily announcing they're making insulin free;
- "Verified" Nintendo sharing a photo of Mario giving the middle finger;
- "Verified" President Biden sharing some sexually explicit content;
- "Verified" Pepsi asserting Coke is better;
- "Verified" Lockheed Martin ceasing weapons production in support of human rights
I suppose if I were an Eli Lily shareholder, I'd be less amused: according to Forbes, it may have caused a 4.7% plunge in their stock price.
Beyond alienating brands, he's alienated his workforce. Musk dismissed the Human Rights team; he dismissed the Ethical AI team; he dismissed anyone who openly criticized him. Worse yet, he mocked them afterwards.
The monetization failure, when paired with the sweeping, haphazard and unempathetic layoffs that rocked LinkedIn feeds over the last few weeks, leads me to wonder how many users will remain in the long term. Users are already searching for alternatives.
In our last guest lecture, we heard that conversations on twitter (which vary in level of rigor, professionalism, and source, spanning personal opinions, to news, to gossip) may move to other platforms like LinkedIn, which will be an interesting challenge for LinkedIn moderators, who have managed to maintain a relatively professional content feed.
If that is indeed the case - where will traffic move to, and how do marketers adjust? In today's issue of the Marketing Brew, the editors shared a link to A Beginner's Guide to Mastodon. Will traffic move there, and if so, would it serve marketers to begin planting seeds in alternatives? Will advertising work similarly in these platforms, or will the potential twitter exodus give rise to a new industry of experts in alt-social media?
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