The LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® Twitter manifesto

The authors of many of the blogs I read that are topically related to this one now use Twitter.  So do a lot of other people, and mostly they seem to talk about Twitter. They not only fail to recognize this as a problem, but I have even seen evangelists point to it as as something to be excited about. (I wrote more about this here so I won’t do it again.)   Even more disheartening is getting tweets from people I otherwise respect telling me to go to such-and-such site and get 400 new followers “free,” presumably merely by promising to spam my existing followers with the same message. Dumb, dumb, dumb!

But I have learned how to meticulously add to the list of those I follow so that the vast majority of my (limited) tweeting time is spent on tachlis.  My new and improved understanding of how to constructively utilize that flighty medium is not simply to  maximize the number of people who will call themselves your “followers” in exchange for either automated reciprocity or some other trick that adds to their “followers” count, with no regard to whether this dumb audience cares about your feed.  The tweets I send are overwhelmingly either blog posts or re-tweets of blog posts that I believe will be of interest to those who are following me presumably because they are interested in the things I already write about.

Twitter, in other words, is — as far as I can see — potentially useful only as a device for targetting narrowcasting of what you have to offer to an audience that cares.  It is not the big schmear.  To the extent my feed audience grows it will, I hope, be because more and people who read this blog (or my other one, which I know is not necessarily an ideal match) are either subscribing to it via Twitter or are among those colleagues and, of course, prospective clients or referral sources who “get it.”

All that was by way of introduction to the following:  By virtue of this shift in media, noteworthy posts that once became posts here, either with a minimum of commentary or at least a riff, are now being “retweeted” by me — hence delivering value to my topically-oriented followers — but are frequently no longer making it to the big time.  “The big time,” of course, is defined as a link on LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®.

Well, that ain’t right. So following this post, which by the time I wrote it appeared to be worthy of its own slot, you will find the first of what will probably be a weekly roundup of the last week’s by LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®* topical trademark tweets.  Copyright, too, and whatever else I write about here, but that would have ruined the alliteration.  You can follow the links directly to the blog posts in question, so you need not be a twit yourself to benefit — though you may want to consider it.

* Which is me.  Unlike some of my bloggy friends, some of whom are pictured here, the blog doesn’t have an eponymous Twitter feed, much less one Twitter feed for the blog and one for the man.   LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® is me,  and I am it.  I am diluted enough as it is!

Ron Coleman