Impersonal brands

Hashtags. They’re a pretty useful tool to help filter all the stuff we can find on platforms like Twitter. They helped define the idea of a trending topic. You can say they’ve become a pretty standardised way to organise all the informational chaos around us.

Now, what follows is an accidental experiment done on Twitter with hashtags. Nothing scientific. But something that I think carries an important message for anyone who gives a shit about social media. Or general ways to get people to give a shit about you.

It all started with a funny tweet which I ended up RTing.

After sharing this, my friend Hugo Alves quickly replied in his typical tongue-in-cheek way.

And then something weird happened.

Interesting. It didn’t stop there. Hugo replied.

And then… magic.

So we started playing this silly game.

And you know what?

Moral of the story? Hashtags are useful but careful what you use them for. They help us organise things but also have secondary effects. They facilitate automated responses that I don’t give a shit about. They create shallow conversations. Their very purpose — to facilitate discovery — just creates more noise. Of course, it’s not the hashtag’s fault — we can all be thankful to Chris Messina for first coming up with it. It’s people who are to blame.

I honestly don’t get the purpose of doing this. Is it because it’s a ‘growth tactic’? Maybe this is how people aim to promote themselves as ‘thought leaders’ (sorry) in a field. Maybe it’s about building a ‘personal brand’ (sorry). I have no idea. But I do know that there’s nothing personal about this. Shallow tactics create shallow results. There’s nothing personal about being shallow and no one wants shallow brands. No offence to the people above, but if with this you want to build a personal brand, all you did was make things more impersonal for me.

A moment to reflect, then. If we need to kick our marketing crack habit, maybe we should start a 12-step programme to stop automating our own online presences. The world will thank us for it. Maybe in the end it will even start paying attention to what we have to say.