Okay, Let’s Fix Twitter
I am a few dollars short of the $44B Elon Musk paid for Twitter, but more importantly — nobody should have bought it. Business transactions of size should be unemotional and properly vetted. This felt emotional and hasty.
Which is ironic, because Twitter is a platform that thrives on emotion and haste. I’ve been a Twitter user during good times:
- Entire feed watching television shows together in real time like we’re all sitting on a big ol’ virtual couch
- The aftermath of Seal Team Six arriving uninvited to Osama bin Laden’s hideaway
- Innumerable triumphant or devastating sporting events that left me elated or shattered
The Bird has been a part of my life since 2009. I joined it strictly for sports reasons, but ended up making a whole bunch of real-life friends from it.
That’s why I still have an account — fleeting hope my curated timeline will one day reclaim its power to amplify moments worth savoring. Which is to say…I’ve also been a Twitter user during bad times:
- Literally every minute since the summer of 2016
Like most social media platforms, Twitter has devolved into an engagement instrument that amplifies cheap, lurid devices to keep users engaged. It is a giant toilet at a rave patronized by people who only eat rancid cheese.
The key to safely using Twitter is not using it all, or finding the discipline to use it sparingly and unemotionally. Rave toilet version: You have to flush and clean Twitter constantly in order to keep it from making you sick.
But this is kind of like Phillip Morris telling you to smoke responsibly.
Unfortunately for anti-capitalists, social media market demand means there’s money to be made — and if Twitter isn’t doing it, someone else will. That doesn’t mean buying it for $44B, but what’s done is done. Might as well do some good for the world and make a fraction of the money back, right?
Winning requires differentiation, cost containment, customer retention, a Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) expansion strategy and innovation that makes the service sustainable. For starters. Nothing emotional or hasty about this business.
But fixing Twitter is still a tall order. Fortunately, the new owner has tapped his STEM genius electric car engineers to do the job. Let’s just assume they’re socially affable and grounded, normal people with garden variety charisma whose interactions with fellow humans are gentle and poignant.
I’m sure they’ll do great. But I’m still happy to lend 5 high-level insights for improving Twitter for free. First, let’s remember a six-year old tweet:
Freedom Eagle dot Facebook is actually Facebook’s birth certificate name. The world’s most popular birthday reminder machine and swindle engine is failing loudly under the weight of executive hubris, stemming from bad decisions made by its billionaire CEO.
Fortunately, that guy is a cartoonish billionaire, an empty-eyed robotic Bond-villain caricature. He’s nothing like Twitter’s new owner. Right?
Tip #1: Learn from Facebook’s Mistakes.
Cautionary tales are powerful. They’re the best Harvard Business Reviews.
Many years ago when I was a Facebook regular, I was bombarded by invitations to join groups like “100,000,000 Angry Moms” and “Patriots Against Socialism” with pitches like we are sick and tired of Barack Obama and we are taking our country back.
That showed up in my feed during the 2008 holidays. Interesting, I thought, Obama hasn’t even been inaugurated. Hmm, this smells like astroturfing!
Authenticity is hard to identify online, but sometimes it’s jarring how low the bar is for tricking people. I’ve seen PhDs and lawyers (l a w y e r s!) copy and paste declarations into their Facebook statuses hereby prohibiting the site from using their photos.
Being online makes smart people very stupid. This includes you and it definitely includes me. Also one hundred million moms? That’s way too many moms. Try to wrap your head around how many boxes of wine that is.
Twitter was still innocent in 2008, but it was only a matter of time until it became every bit of the toxic and manipulative sewer that Facebook was when it basically copied Hot Or Not to get its start, before devolving into its current form, Everyone Here is a Geopolitical Epidemiologist with a Doctorate from the University of Internet.
The more Twitter became like Facebook, the more the experience suffered.
Which is to say Twitter is not the only social network bad actors have appropriated to tear societies apart. Unfortunately their toxicity fetish is good for short-term wins — charlatans who cannot stop lying or saying horrible things attract quite a bit of attention.
Being a human dumpster fire in the public square catches a lot of eyeballs. Turning the mundane into a centuries-long conspiracy is good, for a moment.
But it doesn’t build trust. It doesn’t create a relationship. It doesn’t produce dividends. If you’re going to buy anything for $44B…you need all of that.
Provocateurs and grifters have flourished in the social media era, and Twitter has been a useful vehicle for their swindling. Twitter is a hijacked and toxic asset in need of repair that can serve humanity and produce a profit, and since ̶w̶e̶ he just paid $44B for it, we might as well patch it up.
That requires more cops. Everyone likes cops, right? Twitter users can still say whatever they like — just not on Twitter. Not without consequences.
Action: Invest in keeping garbage out of the experience, no matter how lucrative it might be. That sugar high will come crashing down. Ask Facebook.
Upside: Customer Retention, New Customer Acquisition, Reputation, Sustainability
Competitors include: All social media platforms
Tip #2: Be Good. Also, Don’t Be Evil.
Merging shareholder primacy — killing us since its inception — with altruism is not something business has solved or prioritized.
This gives Twitter a transformational opportunity that dwarfs what Steve Jobs found when he returned to Apple in 1997 — which itself was an asset in disrepair. A decade later, the world Thought and was Different.
Twitter governance must be active, transparent, vigilant and vocal. It needs varying and diverse points of view all grounded in rationality and empathy. Facts. Truth. Not negotiable. Sometimes you don’t gotta hear both sides. Sometimes the truth has exactly one side and one point of view.
I’ve been on Twitter since 2009 and have no idea what governance looks like. What I do know is I’m forced to mute trending topics revolving around provocative things politicians and celebrities have said every time I log on.
There’s no requirement to amplify bullshit. There’s no virtue in posturing and shirking responsibility with caveat emptor non-guardrails which have clearly failed to keep Twitter from being stinky every day at least since the summer of 2016.
Innovate ways to quiet the energy that’s created such high conspiracy and hatred waves on the platform. Create a standard every other platform must catch up to. You paid $44B for this, you can afford to play the long(er) game.
It took Jobs 10 years. Give yourself five. Maybe it will take four.
Action: Prioritize truth and altruism over shock and awe.
Upside: Sustainability, Customer Confidence, Reputation
Competitors include: All social media platforms
Tip #3: Verification is not a Profit Center.
Twitter has defined two types of users: Those with verified blue checkmarks and those without them. It’s Dr. Seuss’ Sneetches in real life.
Two big problems with Twitter verification: One, it’s been effectively vilified by grifters who use it as a vehicle for their manufactured fake populism. Almost without fail, every person on Twitter loudly reviling the elitist with a blue check is…ten-hour drum roll…an elitist with a blue check.
Two, the overwhelming majority of verified Twitter accounts are celebrities or journalists; ordinary people trying to gain verification for whatever reason that motivates them are rejected at nearly a 100% clip.
Sorry, you’re just not important or famous enough is a velvet rope with no revenue or experience upside. This is not innovation. It’s dumb business.
Action: Charge a one-time, non-refundable verification fee that cost-plus covers Twitter’s administrative expenses, since this needs to be a legitimate vetting process.
Twitter can still reserve the right to quietly grant free verification to celebrities or whomever. Restaurant servers do it with dessert all the time.
Upside: Customer Stickiness
Competitors include: All social media platforms and commerce sites
Capitalists: As aroused as we are by recurring revenue and flimsy subscription models for things that don’t need subscriptions — Verification ain’t it. Predictable revenue can be found through more strategic, sustainable and customer-friendly means.
I know it sounds weird and antiquated, but you don’t want your customers to hate doing business with you.
Tip #4: Identify Yourself.
Twitter still hasn’t figured out what it is or aspires to be, which is mystifying — that’s one of the first things you’re supposed to solve for when you stand up any organization.
This is the company that had Vine in its grasp, couldn’t figure out what to do with it and squandered the opportunity, basically ceding that market segment to TikTok. When you don’t know who you are, you slip.
Twitter can be an Experience Platform that serves as a broker for precisely whatever you need online — a job, a show, a flight, a used book, a new scarf or simply a conduit to express your feelings into the void.
Which means it must find out who we are. That goes beyond verification, and it doesn’t need to be Instagram-creepy where you casually mention the word suitcase in a post and then get ads from Samsonite for the next week.
Are you a poet? Insurance adjuster? Athlete? Pastor? Aspiring chef? Just an ordinary person interested in a variety of stuff? Validation categories can create vibrant, door-less ecosystems beyond Verified and Not Verified.
User validation creates three vital elements for revenue generation: a) stickier customers, who now feel like members and want to keep coming back. b) validated buyers of goods and services. c) validated sellers of goods and services.
You know who verifies nearly all of its users? Amazon. It does pretty well.
Everyone Twitter validates will have the confidence to at least consider opening their wallets in that now slightly-more-trustworthy and less-toxic ecosystem. Its marketplace potential exceeds what Facebook built and is now squandering by allowing so much grift and trash into the fold.
Unlocking revenue demands verification. Distancing your users out of vanity is a tactic for companies who hate money but love fraud.
Action: Engineering channels into marketplaces, clubs, business seminars, educational offerings and online venues like conferences and concerts.
Upside: Top-line revenue, SAM expansion
Competitors include: LinkedIn, Ticketmaster
Tip #5: Efficient, One-Touch Sanitizing
It only takes one grifter’s opinions spreading like mold to wreck a timeline.
The internet is disgusting — let’s be clear, this isn’t just a Twitter thing — but Twitter should aspire to be better than the Internet. I’ve used megablock.xyz for awhile to pre-sanitize my mentions and Twitter experience.
You take one viral terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad tweet, drop it into megablock and it auto-blocks every account that Liked or Retweeted it.
The blast radius might take out a stray bystander or three, but it mostly disinfects your experience from — let’s keep this dignified — undesired content creators. This functionality shouldn’t require heavy administration or several clicks to keep radioactive fecal matter out of the experience.
Action: Integrate seamless tools and functionality for validated users to customize their experience to their liking.
Upside: Customer Stickiness, Customer Experience
Competitors include: All social media platforms
This is just a sliver of what could be a transformational experience for the company and who knows what else (the country? Democracy? The world? Mars? Definitely Mars).
Still, Twitter is probably beyond being salvaged, and recouping a $44B investment while untangling the financiers who helped put that bag together and getting ahead of any wanton intentions they may have for the asset…well, those aren’t old Twitter experience problems.
Those are new Twitter CEO problems. He bought the right to take that on himself.
