What Twitter Can Teach Us…About Ourselves

You can make a strong argument that Twitter (& other social media) isn’t very useful. But I love it. I have #tweetarrhea. But the fact is, Twitter teaches something – well it teaches lots of things, but one thing that is actually useful. Twitter teaches us ‘Branding’.

Branding is ‘the act of defining as a name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended for identification & recognition’.

If you think about it, by twittering, you are branding yourself. You already know that. You subconsciously act based on this belief. But you may not have yet identified this truth. But it is there.

For example, do you ever tweet, “I’m going to the bathroom”? What about, “I’m sitting at home alone on a Saturday night”? Or, “I really enjoy Britney Spears music”? Of course not. You don’t want people to know those things about you. That would make you look lame. Really lame.

Instead you tweet “Going to the [insert awesome band here] concert tonight!” and “Out at the pub with great friends!” Those things convey a message. Those things make you look awesome.

That being said, the message conveyed is not so much a message of who you are, as much as a message of who you want to be. You could sit at home 9 out of 10 weekends and not tweet about it. But the one weekend you do something substantial, that activity gets tweeted. Do you see what I mean? You are 90% boring and 10% cool. But it is the 10% that is presented to your friends to represent you. It’s all branding.

Today’s young may be crashing their cars all over town as they text & tweet. But they are developing a deeper understanding of ‘branding’.

Buckle up.