Twitter CEO Elon Musk gave a statement that has the internet divided — and it’s about the prominence of the social media platform as a reliable “source of truth.”
What Happened: Musk took to Twitter to share an update about Community Notes, but before that, he said that the microblogging site is “arguably already the least wrong source of truth on the internet.”
Musk’s statement didn’t go well with many Twitter users, while others like Dogecoin
DOGE/USD-4.60%+ Free Alerts
co-creator Billy Markus, also known by his Twitter handle, Shibetoshi Nakamoto, said that “crowdsourcing is much better than a ministry of truth.”
Here are a few more reactions to Musk’s tweet:
This is how you can potentially earn extra income every single month.. Benzinga’s full-time trader Chris Capre is sending simple options trade alerts to traders like you. Click Here to get his trades for only $0.99!
Why It’s Important: Before Musk’s tweet, Community Notes’ official Twitter handle announced that the notes would also be shown on Quote Tweets. The feature is already live on the web app and will soon launch in iOS and Android versions.
Besides the Community Notes update, Twitter has been working on other features. Developer Alessandro Paluzzi shared a series of posts saying that the platform has discarded the downvotes features in the latest Android alpha release and is working on the long-format tweets.
The research firm suggests treating the beleaguered platform like an emerging channel
A new report from Forrester, “Twitter Isn’t Canceled; It’s Downgraded,” stresses that Twitter is far more relevant to users than advertisers and provides suggestions on how marketers should treat the platform moving forward.
Forrester data reveals that 22% of online adults in the U.S. used Twitter weekly in 2022, well behind Facebook (63%) and Instagram (40%).
The company said in the introduction to its report, “Twitter ranks highly on the cultural relevancy scale but low on the advertiser priority list. It’s where news breaks, politicians debate, activists organize and niche communities meet. And despite Twitter users threatening to leave the platform, application downloads are up since Elon Musk took over. No other social media platform—not even Reddit, Mastodon or Hive—can replace Twitter for consumers.”
Principal analyst Kelsey Chickering delved further into the advertising side in a blog post, writing, “The advertising community has given Twitter more oxygen than it deserves since Elon Musk took over. The reality is that Twitter has never been a critical media channel in the overall media mix, comprising just 1.3% of 2022 digital ad spend based on Forrester’s 2022 Advertising Forecast, U.S. Why? The ad experience on Twitter has never quite caught up with other ‘legacy’ social media platforms such as Meta’s family of apps. According to media buyers and social media strategists who spoke with Forrester, Twitter doesn’t quite deliver on lower-funnel performance.”
Forrester said in the report that advertising executives it spoke with believe Twitter’s direct-response ad products pale in comparison to those from Meta when it comes to meeting lower-funnel media goals, and they only rely on Twitter for mid- to upper-funnel media goals like awareness and consideration.
Advertisers also told Forrester Twitter’s targeting and personalization capabilities are less mature than those of other social media platforms.
Forrester suggested that marketers treat Twitter as an emerging channel within the advertising maturity spectrum, breaking out that spectrum as follows:
Always on:
Meta: Ad formats for every part of the customer lifecycle and proven performance
Campaign-dependent:
Pinterest: Original Pin formats still useful but finding its way in video and commerce
Snap: Leader in augmented reality and advanced in providing creative resources to brands
LinkedIn: Top channel to capture consumers when they’re in a business mindset
Test and learn:
Reddit: Rising star in advertising capabilities and advanced in brand safety
TikTok: Social media’s darling but hard to succeed without creator partnerships
Twitter: Unevolved ad experience and growing brand safety concerns, but still offers a unique experience for live updates and news
The research firm added that marketers should consider the following questions when planning for the remainder of 2023:
Will my brand consistently appear in a space that complies with our safety guidelines? Forrester noted that Twitter’s policy on brand safety and moderation is a moving target at best, suggesting that as these policies change, brands should evaluate them against their own overall digital media brand safety guidelines.
To what degree is my target audience spending significant time on Twitter? Forrester said even if an advertiser’s target audience loved Twitter before, they may be shopping around, so brands should determine if their time on Twitter is growing or waning and whether they’ve transferred that time to other platforms.
What share of social media spend has Twitter historically held on my media plan? If Twitter hasn’t taken up a large portion of a company’s media spend to date, the dollars are probably easily absorbed elsewhere.
What material impact has Twitter had on our business results? Forrester believes advertisers should look at whether they have seen a dip in brand health metrics or sales after shifting their Twitter budget to other channels.
Does Twitter deliver an ad or user experience that’s not available on other platforms? Forrester suggests keeping a pulse on Twitter’s changing ad experience and whether other channels can deliver on a brand’s goals and audience.
Chickering wrote in the blog post, “Advertisers such as Chevrolet and Chipotle paused their Twitter spend for fear of appearing beside extremist, racist and inflammatory content. The Washington Post found ads for over 40 advertisers on white nationalist Twitter pages recently reinstated by Musk. At the same time, not every major advertiser has decided that Twitter is unsafe. Amazon continues to run paid media on the platform. Musk also introduced a ‘flash sale’ in an attempt to lure lost advertisers back.”
She suggested that brands that are not comfortable with Twitter in its current state under Musk:
Refrain from posting any brand content to Twitter. Direct social media teams’ efforts to other channels that meet brand safety requirements.
Monitor and respond to customer-service-related questions. If customers are reaching out for help or have questions about products, continue responding in order to ensure a positive customer experience.
Listen for relevant cultural trends or product feedback. As usage continues on the platform, use social listening tools to find out what trends are popping and how consumers are talking about your company’s category to inform your marketing strategy.
Test other social media channels. Twitter has downshifted into a social media startup rather than an established platform. Roll your previously dedicated Twitter dollars into a pool of test dollars for channels including TikTok, Reddit and Snapchat.
Finally, Forrester shared the reasons cited in a survey last November of 101 adults in the U.S. who stopped using Twitter or planned to do so in the next month:
31% found content on the platform to be too hateful
Over 200 million Twitter users woke up to find their email and log-in details had been posted online.
According to several reports, the data was stolen over a year ago but has only just been put up for sale on ‘Breached’, a dark web market place.
The data, contains emails and partial log-in details for over 200m users is available for sale for the crypto currency equivalent of $2 (£1.69) each.
Alon Gal, of Israeli cyber security firm Hudson Rock first reported the breach over LinkedIn, he said it was “one of the most significant leaks I’ve seen.”
Meanwhile, Bleeping Computer, a New York based tech and security firm. said they had confirmed the validity of a number of the leaked emails. They also said the data included not only email addresses and phone numbers but also names, screen names/user handles, follower count, and account creation date.
The security breach comes as experts question whether Twitter will be able to handle system vulnerabilities. Since taking over the social media platform, Elon Musk has fired over half of Twitter staff.
Last week, two UK politicians saw their Twitter accounts hacked, spelling trouble for public figures on the platform.
A senior threat researcher at Sophos has advised caution saying: “Now is the time to assume a brace position for a possible crash of Twitter. This is what many information security professionals are doing: it’s what everyone should be doing now.”
According to cybersecurity experts at Wedbush Securities, Musk’s mass firing means that no one is left to “fix things” that are broken.
“There’s skeleton staff right now left and I think that’s pretty scary, especially around the cybersecurity side. You start to lose some key engineers, developers, key people internally, I think that’s where this thing can really cascade,” technology analyst Daniel Ives was quoted saying.
Twitter may not be the biggest social media platform out there, but it’s certainly one of the most influential, because what happens on Twitter doesn’t just stay on Twitter. Which might be why the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is such a fan.
Musk bought the company for an eye-popping $44 billion, despite the fact that Twitter, which relies on advertising for much of its revenue, has turned a profit in only two of the last ten years.
Tech journalist and podcast host Kara Swisher harked back to businessman Victor Kiam advertising Remington electric shavers: “There was an old thing, ‘I liked the shaver so, I bought the company.'”
Since his takeover, Musk has fired, or accepted resignations from, about two-thirds of Twitter’s staff. “He thinks he can reform it,” Swisher said. “If you looked at it as a business, you’d have to say, ‘No, no, stay away from this.’ But it’s sort of like buying a yacht or a baseball team for a rich person. This is interesting to him.”
Swisher has known Musk for over 20 years and has interviewed him extensively. Lately though, he hasn’t been such a fan of her coverage of him.
Since buying Twitter, Musk (a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist”) has invited back some users who had previously been banned or otherwise restricted. He’s fired employees who have tweeted criticisms of him, and he posted (and then deleted) what one commentator called “the most expensive tweet ever”: a conspiracy theory about Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Expensive because there’s speculation that that tweet, and many others from Musk, have caused advertisers to flee Twitter in droves.
“Now he’s antagonizing advertisers and calling them ‘woke,'” Swisher told correspondent Luke Burbank. “Advertisers will advertise on Satan, Inc., if it’ll sell a Fitbit. I mean, honestly!”
A documented rise in hate speech since Musk’s takeover came to a head this past week after the rapper formerly known as Kanye West tweeted a photo of a swastika, prompting Musk to suspend his account.
Swisher said, “Anything that’s more moderated – and I’m using word ‘moderated,’ not ‘censored’ – tends to do better with users, with advertisers, with the entire experience.”
But Musk thinks Twitter’s prior management unfairly stifled conservative speech. On Friday, when reporter Matt Taibbi tweeted a trove of internal emails purporting to prove Twitter’s “liberal bias,” Musk retweeted the thread approvingly.
Alex Stamos, the former chief security officer at Facebook, says the Russian hacking of Democratic National Committee emails in 2016 made Twitter wary of foreign influence campaigns. “In the days before the 2020 election, Twitter made the decision to not allow people to post the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop until they could try to figure out whether or not that was part of a government influence campaign,” he said. “And then they decided, since it was going to get covered, that they should allow it to be posted. So, they did make a mistake. But the idea that it affected the election is just ludicrous.”
For some, Twitter’s suppression of that article became a First Amendment issue. But Swisher thinks that misses the point: “It’s gotten sucked up into a free speech conversation or First Amendment conversation, largely by people who’ve never read the First Amendment. Because it’s about ‘government shall make no law.’ That’s all it says, folks. And so, companies certainly can, and they certainly do.”
One current Twitter employee who spoke to “Sunday Morning” asked that we not identify him, for fear of reprisal from Musk and his online fans.
“He said that he wanted to experiment with long-form content, content longer than just a tweet,” he said. “That was already launched and was available on the platform. And he fired the team that had developed it and launched it.”
Burbank asked, “What is your employment status with Twitter as of right now?”
“I’m still technically an employee, but I’m on a suspended status until January 4th, when they will put us on severance, if we sign a severance agreement.”
Like many, this un-named, soon-to-be ex-employee believes Musk is trying to reduce what he owes former Twitter staff, in terms of severance and stock options. “And to be clear, Elon Musk bought the company. He can make any business decision he wants to make,” he said. “It’s the nature in which we were let go and potentially even ways that broke employment law. And it’s the hostile and almost cruel manner in which we’ve been let go in terms of no communication, no direction.”
Stamos said of Musk, “He’s actually a really bad manager, and that’s kind of shocking to me, how bad he is at the human management side of this. The odds of them being able to execute well over this next year, I think, are very long, unless he decides to bring in a CEO to calm things down. And it’s clear that’s what he’s going to have to do at Twitter if they’re going to try to stabilize and stop the bleeding of all of this talent that they need to be able to execute.”
“Sunday Morning” reached out to Musk, but did not receive a reply.
Burbank asked Swisher, “How does he strike you as a person?”
“Oh, it depends on what day,” she replied. “I sometimes think of Silicon Valley as a lot of smart people working on stupid things, and Elon was working on smart things.”
Things like Tesla and SpaceX, Musk’s companies that have arguably revolutionized life on this planet.
But before all that, in 1998, on “CBS Sunday Morning,” correspondent Rita Braver talked to then-27-year-old Elon Musk, who was working at his first startup, Zip2, a city guide on a new thing called the internet. Musk said, “There’s a level of freedom on the internet that really doesn’t exist anywhere else. And there’s no central controlling entity that gets to decide, ‘This content is good, this content is bad.'”
Correspondent Rita Braver at the offices of Zip2 with Elon Musk, who was its chief engineer and co-founder, in 1998. CBS News
But now, Musk is that controlling entity, at least when it comes to Twitter – free to moderate or to allow the spread of misinformation as he sees fit.
One person who understands Twitter’s power? That anonymous Twitter employee, the one who may soon be downsized by The World’s Richest Man: “Whether it’s local to national politics, whether it’s the conversation around important cultural events or cultural issues, whether people use Twitter or not, their lives are shaped by what happens on Twitter.”
Will Mastodon provide safe harbour for marketers amid a growing Twitter exodus?
While there’s still a long way to go for Mastodon to catch up with Twitter’s 238 million daily active users, the decentralized social network’s recent announcement it reached 1 million monthly active users could create fertile ground for a Twitter takeover.
Fears spawned by an increase in posts encouraging hate speech and conspiracy following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, led to a swell of users and brands making the decision to jump ship in an effort to avoid association — and left marketers asking what to do amid the Mastodon vs. Twitter debate.
Some Marketers Still All in on Twitter
Khalil Garriott, vice president for creative content and copywriting strategy with the American Bankers Association, said he currently has no plans or interest in joining Mastodon.
“As a Twitter power user since January 2011, I am still all in on the little blue birdie,” Garriott said. “I’ll admit to not knowing much about Mastodon. I understand that its feed is presented in chrono order instead of algo-based, and I gather that it is an ad-free platform. Both of those seem to be benefits, which might entice me to explore it in the future. So, it’s a wait-and-see approach for me.”
While Garriott waits it out, Mark Freeman II, a senior data scientist at Humu, jumped right on. As someone who provides his audience with content on data and technology, he said he ultimately chose Mastodon for one simple reason — his target audience is already curated.
Mastodon provides access to individual communities, called “instances” or servers, and Freeman is currently part of an “instance” consisting solely of data professionals.
“What’s more exciting is that many of the people I’m meeting on Mastodon are not on LinkedIn and thus increasing my reach to new audiences,” Freeman said. “In addition, even though my ‘home’ instance is curated for data professionals, I can still reach other communities indirectly since Mastodon is federated. Thus, my current strategy to grow on the platform is to create two types of content, data content for my ‘home; community and meta content about Mastodon with hashtags utilized by other communities.”
Is Twitter Experiencing a Mass Exodus?
So who is leaving Twitter? In analyzing more than 3.1 million accounts on Twitter, Bot Sentinel believes approximately 877,000 accounts were deactivated between Oct. 27-Nov. 1.
According to PR Week, several brands including General Motors, General Mills, Volkswagen Group, Pfizer and United Airlines have announced a “pause” on Twitter ad. Ad-purchasing goliath, Interpublic Group, recommended its clients, which include Coca Cola, Accenture, American Express, Fitbit, GoPro, Johnson & Johnson, Levi Strauss & Co, Mattel, Spotify and others, followed suit.
In a call to action, the NAACP and nearly 50 other organizations wrote an open letter to Twitter’s 20 largest US advertisers, calling on them to make a public announcement of their intention to “cease all advertising on Twitter globally” if Musk “follows through on his plans to undermine brand safety and community standards including gutting content moderation.”
NAACP CEO and President Derrick Johnson tweeted that “Until he makes this a safe space for all communities, companies cannot in good conscience put their money behind Twitter.”
Should Leaders Flock to Mastodon?
George Davidson, founder of the marketing consultancy The Lantern and adjunct instructor on Consumer Behaviour and Marketing Strategy at the University of Chicago, said it’s not clear Mastodon will take off. However, brands that like to be first in a space and show their customers they’re leaders, had better get a move on, he added.
“This in itself, may create some momentum for Mastodon and who knows what can happen when a Mastodon gets momentum?” he said.
Davidson applied for Mastodon account but said the rush in the UK has been so great, they are currently processing a backlog. He foresees two big possible impacts for marketers.
“First, Twitter has advertising and Mastodon does not, so marketers used to paying for adverts will have to create compelling creatives that are interesting enough to get shared,” Davidson said. “Secondly, we are used to a rush to claim names online through bagging website addresses and Twitter handles. Owning your own name online has been difficult in the wild, wild web in the past. On Mastodon, you have to make a case to the person running your local server, and that ought to favor marketers who feel they own their own name. You just have to persuade the server owner they agree.”
Check out Michelle Hawley’s thorough examination of what Mastodon servers actually are and other important information on Mastodon.
How Do You Actually Move on from a Social Media Platform?
Curtis Sparrer, principal and co-founder of Bospar, said he often finds the “wait and see” approach cowardly; however, he does think this might be a moment when it’s a good idea.
“While some are fleeing Twitter, this creates an opportunity for some brands to command a stronger share of voice. That said, this is a time for brands to take a serious look at what constitutes their redline when it comes to Twitter,” Sparrer said. “In other words, what are the moments that make sense for your brand to publicly disassociate yourself from the platform? And, should that redline be breached, what is your communication strategy to make your position known so leaving Twitter doesn’t seem improvised, but rather part of a thoughtful communication strategy befitting of your brand?”
For brands that elect to leave Twitter, he recommends a creating a blog, a video testimony and a social media play with other outlets to demonstrate that you have moved on past Twitter and Elon Musk.
The Musk Effect: A Twitter Takeover
After months of machinations, Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter on Oct. 27 — and the same day addressed the advertising community in a tweet titled, Dear Twitter Advertisers, sharing his desire to make Twitter the “most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise.”
And despite previously tweeting “I hate advertising” in 2019 — he now urged advertisers to join him in building “something extraordinary together” and insisted the platform would not become “a “free-for-all-hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences.”
According to Investopedia, the majority of Twitter’s revenue (nearly 90%) is generated through selling ad space on its platform to global advertisers — bringing in $4.5 billion in 2021.
Just a few days after Musk’s takeover, Montclair State University released a study revealing a significant spike in hate speech on the platform just prior to — and immediately following — Musk’s acquisition. nd within the week, amid a mass reduction in staff, Musk admitted the company was losing more than $4 million a day, something he attributed to “activist groups pressuring advertisers.”
Should You Stay or Should You Go: Mastodon vs. Twitter
Rachel Happe, founder of Engaged Organizations, said she doesn’t think most marketers will leave Twitter for Mastodon — at least until there is more there. But she recently told her Twitter followers to follow her on Mastodon “should Twitter either go up in (flames) or become a hell hole.”
“I am not leaving Twitter yet — just hedging my bets,” she told CMSWire.
Benjamin Goh, managing partner BCG said Mastodon could be the way forward for social media apps on the open-source platform. “I used to be active in Twitter, but it’s not popular in Southeast Asian countries where most of my contacts are located, so I’ve stopped using it,” Goh said. “As for Mastodon, my initial inquiry with my network is that most of them have not even heard of it. I guess it will require some time before it gains some significant presence here.”
Bret Smith, CEO and founder of HIPB2B, quit Twitter two months ago, leaving 70,000 followers behind. “As for Mastodon, not seeing lots of upside for B2B yet so will wait and see,” Smith said.
Five years later, he told CMSWire his thoughts remain the same.
“I just don’t believe that people will switch in any significant numbers,” Scott said. “As I said in the post, when a new social network pops up and the defining characteristic is that it is like another social network but better, it’s doomed,” Scott said. “I think marketers can safely ignore Mastodon. I do not think that this little flurry of interest is sustainable, and I do not think that Mastodon or any other social media service will take the place of Twitter. Throughout history, social networks that pioneer a new model can thrive — Instagram, TikTok come to mind — but copycats like Google Plus fail.”
Decentralized Mastodon Could Be Appealing
While Mastodon isn’t nearly as populated at Twitter at the moment, Zacharias Joseph, chief ideations and operations officer at ZACH Multimedia, said that’s exactly where opportunity lies. The decentralized nature of Mastodon should be very attractive to the crypto community.
“A rapid scaling up can help Mastodon pull near or alongside Twitter, especially with the anger of large sections of users, including me, against the childish, capricious manner in which Elon Musk conducts the business and himself,” Joseph said. “Before marketers join the bandwagon of Mastodon with just one million users, Mastodon has to aggressively market itself globally.”
At the moment, he said, it appears Mastodon is a bit slow-moving and needs to be out there aggressively with innovative schemes to ramp up the numbers quickly, especially using the zeal of the newly converted. In addition, a top priority should be to ensure the ease of signing up.
“I tried to join and will join, but the first time I tried I found the process too irksome, so I left it halfway through,” he said. “I am not familiar with the behind-the-screen architecture of Mastodon, and how to work around it, but if Mastodon can provide a unified face for the various federated servers, then the navigation and sign-up functions for customers could be considerably eased, and that would have a force multiplier effect.”
Is Community the Key to Social Platform Success?
Evan Hamilton, director of community at HubSpot and former director of community and customer experience for Reddit, said he was part of the first wave to join Mastodon.
“Having been at Reddit during the long cleanup to get advertisers to return and seeing the challenges of driving subscription adoption, I don’t have a lot of faith Twitter is going to thrive in the coming months,” Hamilton said. “I joined Mastodon to secure my username and explore. Marketers should absolutely do this — it’s good to explore new territory — but I worry that the complexity of Mastodon and the difficulty of moving your audience will keep it from taking off.”
Hamilton said the buzz he’s hearing from people is that they’re realizing Twitter (or at least corners of it) had a culture. They’re not so much lamenting the potential loss of a tool to communicate — because there are plenty of those — but the loss of the culture.
“So, while I think Mastodon, LinkedIn and others will get some bump, I actually think what people are realizing they want is a community, not a public-commons,” Hamilton said. “I predict we’ll see more sustained growth in communities focused on specific interests and practices. … I encourage marketers to think about how they can invest in building owned communities or participating in communities run by others.”
I was famously (infamously) unimpressed with Twitter when it first stormed the beaches a little more than a dozen years ago, telling my USA TODAY column readers not to tweet because “no one cares what you had for lunch!”
Admittedly, my then-editor at the time was not much better, awkwardly titling that column, “Should entrepreneurs Twitter? Uh, no.”
But for sheer audacity and getting-it-wrongness, we pale in comparison to the man who bought the platform for some $44 billion and proceeded, in a few short weeks, to practically burn it to the ground.
Want to ruin your small business? Then all you have to do is take a few pages out of Elon Musk’s playbook.
Businesspeople generally, and small businesspeople in particular, are wont to say our most valuable asset is our people, our team.
Makes sense, no? It is your valuable staff members who do the work, deal with customers, sell, put out fires, manage expectations and get the job done.
I once saw a report that said the most successful franchise owners were not the ones who understood marketing best, or who had the best locations, but rather were the ones who were the best managers. By being inclusive, positive and rewarding, great managers fostered great teams. Great teams begat happy customers and happy customers became repeat customers.
Elon seems to have forgotten that. After buying the company he:
Fired about 3,700 people, roughly half of Twitter’s workforce
Also fired the CEO, the COO, their general counsel and the head of policy. Other execs, seeing the writing on the wall, quit.
Making people work twice as hard because, literally, half the team is gone, and then giving them no leadership nor direction is a sure way to start sinking a ship.
But Elon wasn’t done there. Via email he also informed those remaining that the new normal of hybrid work was over and that all employees would be expected to be 100% full-time, in the office.
How very 2018.
Want to go out of business? Make people work more, work harder, fire their friends, fire their bosses and put them in an environment they don’t want to be in.
As a business model, Twitter is not great. It has only ever been profitable twice (2018 and 2019.) In 2020, the year the whole world moved online and chatted over the Internet, Twitter lost a billion dollars.
Twitter makes the vast majority of its revenue from ads and advertisers, meaning, you and I and the rest of Twitter’s tweeters are not really its customers. Its real customers are its corporate advertisers.
Well, with the business in freefall, with banned and suspended people likely coming back, with the executives that advertisers traditionally dealt with either gone or overworked, and with bots and hate speech running amok because content moderation is in decline, those same advertisers have given Twitter a serious rethink.
Indeed, Volkswagen, United Airlines and many other corporate advertisers have all paused their advertising on the platform.
Great brands are valuable, and they are tough to create. Branding takes time, effort, money, luck, consistency, and vision.
One way Twitter built its brand was by offering a valuable blue checkmark that verified some people as real top tweeters, legit voices worthy of attention. Blue ticks were not easy to get. But now it looks as if anyone with $8 a month to spare will be able to buy one.
Because, after all, if you lose your top advertisers, you have to make that money up somehow, right?
But if everyone can buy verification, then no one is actually verified, and that means that you can add even more fake accounts to this witch’s brew.
With no verification, short-staffed, morale among employees, advertisers, and users at an all-time low, with content moderation moderated, it is probably no surprise that Musk recently told those who are left on the sinking ship that . . . bankruptcy may be in Twitter’s future.
The man is a business startup genius for sure, but who knew that he was also gifted at shipwrecks?
By Steve Strauss
Steve Strauss is an in-demand speaker, attorney and the bestselling author of 18 books, including his latest,”Your Small Business Boom.” Named by SCORE as the top small-business champion in the country, you can learn more about Steve and the Strauss Group at MrAllBiz.com, get more tips at Planet Small Business and connect with him on Twitter at @SteveStrauss and on Facebook at PlanetSmallBusiness.
The public boycott of advertising on Twitter is starting to look a lot like a long goodbye.
GroupM, the world’s largest media buying agency, is telling clients that Twitter is now a “high risk” media buy following a barrage of controversies, U-turns and confusion that capped off Elon Musk’s second week as the owner of the social network.
The advice was shared in a document, seen by Digiday, that warns marketers of the risks of advertising on the volatile social network. It reads: “Based on the news yesterday [Nov. 10] of additional senior management resignations from key posts, high profile examples of blue check abuse on corporate accounts, and the potential inability for Twitter to comply with their federal consent decree, GroupM’s Twitter Risk Assessment is increased to a High-Risk rating for all tactics.”
If this stance is to change, Twitter has to resolve several issues, per the document. They are as follows:
Return to baseline NSFW levels
Re-population of IT security, privacy, trust & safety senior staff
Establishment of internal checks & balances
Full transparency on future development plans of community guidelines/content moderation/ anything affecting user security or brand safety
Demonstrated commitment to effective content moderation, enforcing current Twitter Rules, e.g., account impersonation, violative content removal timing, intolerance of hate speech & misinformation, etc.
It’s a reminder of where the real power lies in this standoff between Twitter and advertisers. Hint: advertising on Twitter has always been a nice to have, not a must have for the advertisers that spend on it. That may be one of the few things that hasn’t changed since Musk took over.
That’s not to say that advertisers are apathetic on Twitter’s fate. They’re concerned, of course — the social network still serves as a major cog in the global news cycle, after all — but they’re not rattled. Not even as Twitter’s senior ranks unravel.
The unraveling accelerated after Musk held an hour-long pow wow on the platform last week (Nov 10). It was done to reassure advertisers that Twitter’s future was fine. A series of sudden resignations and subsequent reversals of them revealed they were anything but. Not least because it involved some of the same people who have wanted the market to believe in Musk. Robin Wheeler, Twitter’s de facto head of ad sales, for starters. A little over a day after she was talking up Musk’s plans on Twitter Spaces, she resigned, and then decided to stay, per Bloomberg.
The symbolism isn’t lost on marketers.
“Corporance governance is shifting all the time,” said one senior marketer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to Digiday. “I can afford to wait and see how this all shakes out. This isn’t like Facebook or YouTube where we might structure media plans around those platforms. On the contrary, our organization is trying to call in any fungible spending right now. Thank you Mr. Musk.”
It gets worse. The other executive on that call with Musk and Wheeler — Twitter’s head of trust and safety Yoel Roth — also resigned. Unlike Wheeler, Roth doesn’t seem to have reversed that decision. Neither has Twitter’s chief information security officer and chief privacy officer, who have also resigned. Oh, and don’t forget all this is happening as the Federal Trade Commission watches on with “deep concern.”
So not only does Twitter pose a brand safety risk to advertisers, it could also be a cybersecurity risk too.
Either one would blow a hole in the ads business of any platform in the current climate — let alone one that most marketers aren’t too concerned about.
“Yes, Twitter is part of the cultural moment, but it doesn’t have a good direct response product so spending there is quite nebulous — or just not good,” said a media director at one of the advertisers that has stopped advertising on the social network. “It’s never been a critical part of the media strategies or plans that I oversee.”
Nothing Musk has said to advertisers either on stage, on calls or even his tweets has been able to change that sobering fact. In fact, the more the controversial billionaire talks about Twitter and advertising on it, the more confused advertisers seem to get.
The way Musk sees it, Twitter is like a town square where “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach”. In other words, people can say all sorts of things — some of it even unsavory — it just doesn’t necessarily have to get amplified to the masses.
The problem is who gets to decide what gets amplified? Whatever the answer is, chances are it’s going to be inextricably linked to pernicious relativism. It’s hard to see otherwise after Musk said he viewed the “truth is a nebulous concept”. Controversy is never far from views like this, and that’s the last thing marketers want to be near right now.
“Elon saying ‘truth is a nebulous concept’ at the start of the session is highly concerning,” said Ruben Schreurs, group chief product officer at media management firm Ebiquity. “This is Kellyanne Conway making a case for ‘alternative facts’ all over again. Truth is truth, simple as that. There’s nothing nebulous about it.”
Schreurs frustration echoes a lot of what the 15 ad executives Digiday has spoken to since Musk took have said. They bemoan a pitch to advertisers that’s light on core principles and permanently in a state of flux, or as amenable behind closed doors as it is combative in the spotlight. In short, marketers aren’t too bothered by what Musk says on Twitter Spaces, at conferences or behind closed doors. They only care about what he does.
“Speaking more specifically about our client set that potentially applies to an even broader group of advertisers, Twitter is not integral enough to their advertising mix to demand this much of their attention and time,” said Adam Telian, vp of media services at marketing agency New Engen.
Needless to say, those pulled ad dollars don’t look like they’re going to be coming back this side of 2023. Then again, they never really were. Advertisers had essentially cut short their spending for this year on Twitter. Nothing Musk has done so far has been able to convince them otherwise.
His new verification scheme? The indecision over it has allowed for fake and parody accounts to proliferate in its slipstream. What about Musk’s plan for Twitter to take another crack at video, or become a payments company or even re-architect the backend of its ad tech in order to power better targeting? Easier said than done at the company in the throes of an employee exodus. It’s the same with his threats. Remember, Musk’s vow to “thermonuclear name and shame” the advertisers that had pulled ad dollars? Still waiting.
Color marketers confused.
“At a base level, Twitter’s reason for being is currently very unclear, as evidenced by his “we’re going to be everything” comments, making it a highly suspect platform to spend money on,” said Evan Levy, president at ad agency Fitzco. “We know TikTok’s reason for being. We know the NFL’s reason for being. Understanding the platforms or properties we’re investing media dollars into should be table stakes. Twitter? To be determined – and so should brands’ investment there.”
It’s a precarious position for any business built on ad dollars — even more so one that’s intrinsically entwined to Musk. His antics are having a direct impact on the business on multiple fronts. Not that he would know. Rather, Musk believes, as stated in meetings with advertisers, that his actions should be divorced from his business — even as ad dollars continue to pour out of it as a direct result of what he’s doing. Regardless of how he opts to try and prop up his flagging asset, the clock is ticking. The entrepreneur has already warned that his company won’t be able to come through the economic downturn if it can’t replace the ad dollars the business has lost since his arrival with additional income. Bankruptcy is not out of the question, he has said. Advertisers are a lot of things, charitable isn’t one of them.
Twitter has plenty of problems, but this isn’t solving any of them.
lon Musk has an interesting way of making sure the world knows exactly how hard he’s working. On Monday, he tweeted that he would be working and sleeping at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters until the “org is fixed.” I guess he thinks the ultimate measure of dedication to your work is that you never leave the office–not even to sleep.
I’ve been at Twitter SF HQ all night. Will be working & sleeping here until org is fixed.
Maybe that’s just how Musk likes to work. Perhaps it makes him feel like he’s getting things done, or that there’s too much to do to waste time sleeping. After the chaotic last few weeks, I think he could use a good night’s sleep. It might help him reconsider a few of his worst ideas for the $44 billion toy he now controls.
It’s not the first time Musk has felt like it was important to make sure people know he sleeps at the office. When Tesla was trying to launch the Model 3, Musk said he slept on the factory floor during what he has described as the most difficult period of his life. I would agree that sleeping on a factory floor would be less than enjoyable.
The thing is, Musk seems to think that “working all the time” is the same as “making it better.” I think we can all agree that’s not always true. Doing lots of things is not necessarily the same as doing the right things. So far, I think many people outside of Musk’s inner circle would say Twitter is not “better” than the day he bought it.
Yes, Twitter was kind of a mess under the previous owners, and it has never been a particularly good business. It’s small, relative to its social-media peers, and it doesn’t make very much money (about $4 billion a year compared to Facebook’s $117 billion last year). But it wasn’t at imminent risk of going bankrupt, something Musk now says is on the table.
Perhaps Musk is trying to motivate Twitter’s remaining employees to double down on his vision for the company. The thing is, it’s not clear anyone has any idea what Musk’s vision is for Twitter. Aside from changing what seem to be Musk’s personal pet peeves with the platform, there is no coherent strategy to turn it into something better.
Musk has said the reason he wanted to buy Twitter in the first place was to fix the problem with bots and spam. Instead, he just sold a blue check mark to any troll willing to pay $8. Also — and this is the most important point — sleeping on the floor isn’t going to fix any of what’s wrong with Twitter.
Look, I think that there is a period in the life of every startup where the founder spends an unhealthy amount of time willing his or her company to survive by the sheer force of his or her own determination. They give up sleep and showers and eating because they are all-in on building a company. There is something admirable about the level of dedication and perseverance that comes with turning an idea into a business.
Twitter, however, is not a startup. It’s a 16-year-old company with a few thousand employees. And it’s now owned by the wealthiest man on earth. It might not be profitable, but it’s far from the sleep-on-the-floor stage. If Musk’s goal is to motivate his employees with a sense of urgency, he’d be better off rallying them around some kind of vision.
Actually, the thing that Musk could do right now to make Twitter better, both for the users as well as the people who work there, is to simply stop making it worse. Stop with the crazy timelines to ship features that haven’t been thought through to their logical conclusion.
Stop trying to recoup all of the money you blew on your new toy with one major change. Stop threatening to fire people if they don’t meet your unreasonable deadlines. Stop firing the people who actually understand how to run, well, Twitter.
The things that have gotten worse under Musk’s leadership are all in service of a problem he created. He’s tried a number of things–like selling the blue check–none of which have made Twitter any better, and none of which have actually worked to do what Musk says he wants to do, which is to generate more revenue to pay the massive amount of debt he took on when he overpaid for the company last month.
Also, there’s the fact that Musk is the CEO of three other companies, one of which is publicly traded, which means Musk has an obligation to shareholders. Spending all night playing with his new toy is probably not the best way to fulfill that obligation.
Fixing Twitter is a great idea. Sleeping on the floor until it’s fixed is a terrible idea.
Hive Social has blown up in 2022, after Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover had thousands of users searching for a new home for their social media posts.
However, just as Hive began gaining traction, the app was forced to (temporarily) close its doors as it addressed some serious security concerns.
Scroll down to learn everything there is to know about Hive Social, including what it is, who runs it and what went down in November 2022.
What is Hive Social?
Hive Social is a microblogging site that launched in 2019 and has frequently been compared to Twitter.
Like other social media sites, Hive allows users to share text, images, GIFs, polls and other posts with followers and lets users differentiate their profiles with usernames, profile images and banners.
Hive also offers some more unique features, including colour themes, profile music (that counts toward artist streams), zodiac signs, badges, Q+As and, most importantly, a chronological feed. Hive’s website assures that there is no shadow banning or higher priority accounts that dictate the order that posts appear on the app, meaning users don’t need to contend with verified users to appear on their followers’ feeds.
Hive also treats NSFW content differently from other social media sites. NSFW photos, videos and digitally-created content are permitted on Hive as long as you toggle the NSFW button in post settings. This prevents this content from being seen by minors.
Hive Social is currently available to download on the iOS App Store or on Android devices through Hive’s beta. However, the lack of a full Android release hasn’t stopped Hive from growing massively – especially over the last few months.
The site saw a huge influx of new users after Elon Musk took over Twitter in November 2022. In an interview with Newsweek, Pop said Hive had reached 1,240,000 users on November 22, including a quarter of a million sign-ups that day.
Who owns Hive Social?
Hive was created by Raluca Pop (aka Kassandra Pop), a 23-year-old student living in Southern California.
After teaching herself to code in June 2019, Pop launched the first version of Hive Social with a freelance developer that same October. Since then, the Hive team has expanded to just three people – Pop, a developer and a designer.
The app is funded by a combination of Pop’s own personal loans, an angel investor and crowdfunding.
Is Hive Social safe?
On November 30 2022, Zerforschung shared a post detailing a number of critical vulnerabilities it had discovered on Hive Social.
These vulnerabilities would allow potential attackers access to a breadth of data, including user email addresses, phone numbers, shared media, private posts and even deleted direct messages.
In response to this report, Hive temporarily deactivated its servers on December 1 to work on creating a “better and safer experience”. At the time of publishing (December 6), the servers are still down.
Many people who use Twitter the most frequently recently stopped using it at all. This presents new owner Elon Musk with a problem he may be unable to solve. The financial results needed to support the deal’s debt could deteriorate instead of improving.
Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) is losing its most active users, internal documents show. According to Reuters, “heavy users” create about nine of ten tweets each month. Heavy users also number about 10% of users, and they generate about 50% of Twitter’s revenue. Reuters reports that the information comes from a report titled “Where Did the Tweeters Go?”
The best reference for the effects of this problem is Twitter’s quarterly financials. Twitter’s revenue was $1.2 billion in the most recently reported quarter. Even a drop of $100 million would drive Twitter well into the red. Advertising revenue already has started to decline because of the recession’s impact on marketing budgets.
Musk may have only one choice to offset the drop in revenue. There are rumors he could cut as many as half of Twitter’s employees. This would mean the company could not monitor bad actors. And the effect on morale would be harsh enough for the best people left to seek jobs elsewhere.
Twitter’s annual debt service may be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Financial firms that supported Musk’s ownership are already concerned they will take huge losses. If the Reuters report is accurate, this is a certainty.
It may be that the worst of Twitter’s multiyear slide began to doom its future as a growth company. That growth is all that has supported its stock, which has dropped by double-digit percentages this year. The only thing that has kept it from collapsing is Musk’s buyout.
Musk tried to pull out of the Twitter deal, and that would have cost him over $1 billion. Now, that sum seems cheap compared to what the company will lose in the future.
Sponsored: Tips for Investing
A financial advisor can help you understand the advantages and disadvantages of investment properties. Finding a qualified financial advisor doesn’t have to be hard. SmartAsset’s free tool matches you with up to three financial advisors who serve your area, and you can interview your advisor matches at no cost to decide which one is right for you. If you’re ready to find an advisor who can help you achieve your financial goals, get started now.
Investing in real estate can diversify your portfolio. But expanding your horizons may add additional costs. If you’re an investor looking to minimize expenses, consider checking out online brokerages. They often offer low investment fees, helping you maximize your profit.
