Innovate this!

As you know, I’m fascinated by how people present themselves on social media, particularly on Twitter. Those who are legends in their own misspelt minds, click follow only so they can spam you with system-generated DMs, or just go straight for the money shot in their profile.

And then there are those who—having found tweets they think are clever, or profound (in a fortune-cookie kind of way), or pithy—use some third-party app to keep flinging them out to the Twitterverse.

I follow a woman (she followed me first; at some time I must have looked at her profile and decided she did not appear to be a pornographer, RWNJ or someone eager to sell me thousands of Twitter followers, so I followed her back) who’s a prime example of this. Here’s a sample of the type of thing she tweets:

Your basic corporate platitudes. Well, earlier this week, I was scrolling through my feed and stopped at this:

My first thought was, “Well, that’s a complete crock of moose milk. Yeah, we want people to acknowledge our ideas. But one splendid form of recognition is monetary, particularly when our ideas bring in vast sums of money to the corporation. Giving us an attaboy when we’ve favorably affected the bottom line is a sure-fire way to find your innovators jumping ship, you cheap-ass skinflints.”

My second thought was, “Hey—I’ve seen this before, because it sparked the same response then.”

I don’t think I necessarily twigged that it was this woman who’d done it, but I went to her page and started scrolling. Sure enough, in addition to Tuesday, she’d spewed this recipe for a decline in morale and innovation on:

2 February

30 January

26 January

25 January*

23 January

19 January

16 January

12 January

9 January

5 January*

1 January

*On these occasions the message was slightly varied:

As though “a study”—an anonymous study—is any kind of validation. Also—she obviously doesn’t read her little platitudes before she clicks the Tweet button. (Or, perhaps she’s just not very sure about the construction of simple English sentences.)

Interspersed with that little gem were others similar to it—also repeated ad nauseam.

Well, at this point, I looked at her actual profile, and all became clear:

“Head of Global Executive Talent” for Cisco is the antithesis of an innovative mindset. Also, 5846 tweets in nine years. I’m betting that there are actually fewer than 200 unique tweets. She’s just recycled them 300 times each.

Thank God for the mute button.