'Tweezing': How to pluck yourself big money from Twitter

House Speaker Jim Wright once supposedly told Ronald Reagan,”You can’t have an economy by washing each others cars and delivering pizza: Voodoo economics is a debt recipe with Depression sauce.”

Yet look at us now. With manufacturing but a rusted memory, and the service economy of selling homes to each other in shambles, we are fearlessly birthing a brand new economic model based entirely on sending short text messages of 140 characters or less to each other.

Forget about cars, forget about pizzas.

Forget even about the news media and the infosphere. All you will find there is story after story pointing you to Twitter.

Yes, just when it started to seem there may soon be no empty space left on Earth for new marketing messages, we have vaulted en masse into an endless, cascading stream of them.

It’s as if Marshall McLuhan is legally marrying Andy Warhol right now, live on the Home Shopping Network.

Light tremulous sounds

Twitter CEO Evan Williams was as famous as you can get for 15 minutes last Friday. He was a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where he offered that he didn’t initially know that “twitter” was the “word for the sound that birds make to communicate with each other.”

The Twitter creation story is heartwarming, but not entirely clear about this detail. In any case, the naming of Twitter was fortunate at least, and possibly perfect.

First of all, there is the pure, alliterative joy that comes from interacting in a world where people talk like a cross between Baba Wawa and the villains from the Batman TV series — a whole twitterverse where the twiterate tweet with twumorous serentwipity.

Additionally, there are the delightfully apt associations to be mined in the dictionary and thesaurus. “Twitter” leads to “cheep” and “chitter” and “gabble” and “chirrup” and “blither” and “yabber,” to name but a few. It turns out that there is an astonishing number of fun-sounding words referring to trivial or meaningless talk.

Monetizing your babble

This brings us back to marketing.

While it can be novel at first to tweet that your are drinking coffee, it is difficult to forge a revenue stream from that fact alone. No, at the very least, you need to add some branding and sizzle:

Morning, everyone! I’m surviving in our economy with some frugal-yet-still-delicious Eight O’Clock 100% Columbian Coffee! http://bit.ly/6sKW

See what I did there? Like a true Twitter marketing pro, I changed a mundane utterance into a focused and exciting message by employing a friendly persona, two exclamation points, a topical reference, some branding, and a compelling link — all in just 140 total characters!

Now, instead of merely ignoring my boring tweet, you might actually be irritated enough by it to take action. And, in the process of trying to unfollow me, you might accidentally click my link, generating some fraction of a penny for someone somewhere, somehow.

Through such tiny sparks, my friends, our economy is being jump-started.

Virtual productivity

Obviously, if you are lucky enough to still have some product or service to promote, you are welcome to go ahead and attempt to prolong its existence by using Twitter to plug it. Granted, spending all your time tweeting might mean neglecting said product and hastening its demise, but rest assured that this was going to happen anyway.

You see, products and services both are hinge pins of the past, mere dinosaur bones of obsolete economic models. Even information, in the sense of having informative quality, is outdated. The key now is to simply make appealing noise, and to make it as instantaneously as possible.

If a tweet falls in the

Consider the worldwide phenomenon that was Oprah Winfrey’s big splash into the Twitter pool. I had strangers from Brazil tweeting me desperate to watch it.

According to her own website and a good many media outlets, her first post was “ASHTON [KUTCHER] IS NEXT!”

However, because she pressed the wrong key, for anyone actually receiving Oprah’s Twitter messages, her first tweet was “HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY .”

The lesson here — a lesson which has made Oprah rich beyond anyone’s wildest dreams — is that the important thing is making, right now, the noise of the moment. What the noise is exactly, does not matter.

One week before her first tweet, Oprah had musical legend James Taylor (whom she loves) on her show. She introduced him with the voice she stole from Charles Nelson Reilly — a loud “Jaaaaaames TAAAAAAAAAY-lorrrrr!”

That voice is the noise of the moment.

Taylor sat down with his guitar and, on command, fast-forwarded through a few snippets of his greatest hits. A huge James Taylor fan, Oprah cut off “Fire and Rain” — Taylor’s song about depression, drug addiction, and the death of a friend — to blurt out, “What’s that song about?” Then, before he could formulate any response, she cut to commercial.

Again: It does not matter. Just make the noise of the moment. You will notice that even Twitter itself remains carefree amid the swirling debate about how it will ever collect revenue.

Emperor nude, but trending

As a good many newscasts and even some former newspapers are discovering, you no longer need any story, or angle, or facts, or pictures of Britney anymore. You just need to say “Twitter” as many times as possible per minute.

First, plan to do a story about Twitter. Then, tweet that you are doing a story about Twitter, and that you need input from tweeple to use in the story. Before it airs, tweet that your Twitter piece is coming up, and ask all your tweeps to retweet. In the story, feature your own Twitter name to attract followers, then post the video clip on your website, and tweet a link back to your tweeps to drive traffic to it.

If anyone questions the journalistic purpose of any of this, remind them of that US Airways/Hudson River Twitpic.

For a master course in journalistic noise of the moment, see CNN’s Rick Sanchez.

The home version

But let’s say you’re among the millions of people without a broadcast facility, or real estate listings, or any other product or service to promote. Can you still use Twitter to make yourself as annoying as a pack of hungry children in a sickeningly impoverished country?

Of course you can. If have have nothing to market, simply modify the TV news model and market your marketing. Declare yourself a Twitter trainer, coach, or guru. Start by tweeting some tips and following the key tweeps, then stick with it, using TweetDeck or TweetGrid to twack twends, slowly retweeting your way to the top.

Like someone who maddeningly repeats everything someone else just said, your job is to scan the twitscape 24/7 for the noise of the moment, and then broadcast that noise — immediately, and to as many followers as possible.

Before you know it, you’ll be living the champagne wishes and caviar dreams of the twue twitterati — who, too twamous to manage their own twarcissism, hire ghost tweeters to handle all the twaffic.

That’s right — thanks to decades of innovation and engineering genius, we now live in a world where some worker that 50 Cent hired can retweet a shortened URL sent by some worker that Guy Kawasaki hired, providing a link to some list of “green” celebrities on Earth Day. How special is that?

I give you: ‘Tweezing’

Anyway, looking through the Twictionary and finding no such term already in use, I hereby coin “tweezing” as a term for “incessant marketing through Twitter; the constant commercial pecks, come-ons, and teases that slowly grind down your soul” — typically, into a smelly brown paste.

Tweezing is similar to spam, but it’s more coy. It pretends to be your friend. “Hey, check this out,” it says. It’s like getting an invitation to one of those in-home product parties.

Some usage examples:

All staff members will now be required to spend two hours each day tweezing our buffet, at the conclusion of their regular shifts.

I suppose that as iPhone metal detector apps go, it’s adequate — but it certainly doesn’t live up to all the tweezing.

He thought he would meet “Amber” at the timeshare presentation, but it turns out there is no such person. It was just one big tweeze!

Now, having finished this post, I’m going to tweet a link to it, hopefully generate a little traffic, and build on the $0.03 I have already earned today.

(Oh, and please retweet!)