How a sarcastic tweet stirred up Pro-GMOers
I tried to talk to anti-GM consumers but all I got was a bunch of angry scientists, Monsanto employees, and farmers
All the buzz was about this tweet which I posted to garner attention of anti-GMO people following the #ShiftCon tag on Twitter and provide me with an opportunity to maybe educate a few of them. I guess none of them decided to bite, but a bunch of pro-GMO advocates fell for it like a silverback with a mirror.
These were all of the direct responses:
Plant breeder who teaches biology.
GM scientist who seemed happy with my answer to her direct question.
A lovely nurse and wheat farmer’s wife with a successful blog.
Biochemist.
Finally someone got the joke (I think) and posted a great joke response. (photo originally posted by @MGigger)
And then this guy… who works for Monsanto.
It’s easy to say this tweet was incredibly successful on the analytics side of things, and it actually made me a bunch of new connections and got me about 5 new followers. And that bitly link? 58 clicks during the life of the tweet. It just links back to the Instagram photo (but if only I’d had something written up before that to make this whim of a tweet a more well thought out evil plan!). The failure was getting engagement from the target audience. Perhaps some people from shift con actually did click on the link, just to be disappointed that all it was was the photo’s source. I wasn’t as knowledgeable about free stock photos back then…
I figured hey, they’re used to believing outlandish claims, why not make something really crazy sounding and see what happens?
Then a few days later one of my friends asked the question I was hoping for and made it all better with an actual intelligent back and forth conversation. Imagine that.
This was a fun little experiment in creating constructive controversy. The full article explaining how to tell if your food is GMO just by looking at it has now been published:
