Stephen Fry talks Twitter – “human shaped, not business shaped”
Twitter is a massively popular social networking and micro-blogging site that has gained an inordinate amount of headlines and copy over the past year or so. But what is the nature of Twitter? Is it for people to converse and share ideas, or is it for companies to try and connect with their customers and ultimately sell stuff? Stephen Fry, unsurprisingly, has an opinion on the matter.
It was only a few weeks ago that Stephen Fry, darling of the intelligent and proof that not all upper-class people are morons, threatened to quit Twitter after one of his followers branded his Tweets “boring.” He ended up staying and is continuing to share his activities, views, and insights with his more than 1 million followers.
And Fry continues to speak up and defend Twitter for what it is. According to The Telegraph, Fry was speaking at The 140 Characters Conference in London, organized by Web entrepreneur Jeff Pulver. The conference was branded, ‘Exploring the State of Now’, and was designed to discuss how Twitter is affecting society. Fry said:
Like with the printing press, Twitter [has] changed the situation. People like me, Twillionaires, we can cut out the press from our PR requirements. It used to be a pact with the devil. You wanted to inform the press about a new film and they said they will interview you, but only if they are allowed to ask you around other themes about your private life.
Today, Britney Spears tells her PR manager, ‘Why should I care about this journalist of this newspaper with a big circulation? I will reach their circulation just by typing into my keyboard.’ So well, whole newspapers are on the one side filled with resentment against Twitter, on the other side they are using it and searching Twitter messages.
Twitter is about participating – by which I mean you tweet and read other people’s tweets. Then you understand it, and get its rhythm. But remember: It is about being authentic. These things are human-shaped.
It is important for all of us to understand its [Twitter’s] nature. It is human shaped, not business shaped. And the swell will move elsewhere if you try to make it all neat and attractive. The greatness and the magnitude of its energy will all move.
Fry makes great points, especially in regard to how useful Twitter is for celebrities. We’re all used to seeing film stars and musicians doing the rounds of chat shows and giving interviews in newspapers and magazines purely to promote their latest work. But the release of their movie or album is usually buried deep within a sensationalist look into their private lives, whether they wanted to bear their soul or not.
What Twitter is allows celebrities to connect with fans directly, cutting out the middle-men and promoting their work and their life purely by being present on the site. That’s not good news for TV shows and the print media but it is good news for both celebrities and their fans, who get an insight into their lives with all the PR BS cut out of the equation.
As for Twitter being “human shaped, not business shaped,” I fear Stephen Fry is going to get a nasty shock in the near future. Twitter should be about the people and about communication but the bottom line is that to make the site pay it’s going to have to become much friendlier and more useful to businesses selling their wares. Whether that move changes Twitter for the worse is something we won’t know until it happens.
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November 18th, 2009
Your last paragraph is the most telling of all! I think Fry will be a bit surprised at the requisite shift that will be required to allow twitter to evolve beyond the end user social influence it is based on now. Though the landscape for thought leaders is immeasurably muddied at the present time, media relations will catch up to current paradigm eventually and the experts outside the 2.0 arena will once again begin to generate value to the end user.