Future tense

One of the many downsides of the Internet is that anyone with a connection and access to rudimentary graphics software can produce memes and start polluting the ether with them. This explains about 90% of the political crap you see out there—in all directions. But you also see it in the “business” world, particularly among those whose Twitter profiles are chockers with descriptors like “thought leader”, “keynote speaker”, “growth hacker”, “ninja” and “author”. (Keep in mind that anyone can slap together a few pages of drivel, PDF it and offer it online, thus entitling their self-styling. They don’t ever use the word “writer”.)

Frankly—if your profile doesn’t include some tangible connection to actual, you know, operational business, then you can keynote your ass out of my timeline, because first among your descriptors should be “poseur”. That’s your real defining characteristic.

Anyhoo, this crowd is really big on tweeting what they consider either pithy or inspirational (or perhaps inspirationally pithy) “quotes” to up their traffic stats. Then they get retweeted, which only encourages them to produce more, and so it goes. Typically they post a meme—even if it’s only putting the words into a graphic—and often repeat the words in their tweet. In case you find a meme tl:dr.

Someone I follow on my professional Twitter account, who has a frankly disturbing headshot, claims to be Chief Marketing Officer of a Utah company that produces a technology learning platform (yeah—I don’t really care), into tech, marketing, SaaS, start-ups, and is data-driven and mother of three boys (whew!). Yesterday morning she tweeted this:

It did not seem like anything the 16^th President of the United States would have said, so I did what everyone who sees something like this should do: I Googled it. And, indeed, the first time something like this sentiment was used was in a book published in 1963, according to this site, which appears to be the Snopes of quotes.

I replied to super-marketer-mom pointing out that her little ray of encouragement dated from about 100 years after Lincoln’s death. (Hey—I was polite. And I provided the same link that I did here.)

She ignored me and left her tweet up. But she unfollowed me.

There’s a lesson here—probably several, actually—about not being such a muppet for aphorisms, or about pushing them out uncritically to the Twitterverse, or about actual engagement via the social media you claim to be expert at.

As for me, my lesson is that I’ve now unfollowed her, as well.