#motrinmom

Chatting with a friend who does information architecture for pharmaceutical advertising she was shocked I hadn’t heard about the “Motrin Mom” twitter-in-a-teapot. I had no idea what she was talking about.

Apparently “Twittering Critics Brought Down [the] Motrin Mom Campaign”. And the entire advertising industry, at least here in New York, is having a fear-of-a-twitter planet moment. Complete with righteous anger about the “irrationality of Twitter”. (um, hello folks, but didn’t you build one of the largest global business by cynically manipulating people’s “irrationality”?)

But the part that really caught me off is this didn’t blip my radar at all. Maybe I was just offline for it, but as far as I can tell the twittering classes I follow didn’t peep about this. I thought Twitter was all about us? (Also, Summize you are already awesome and everything, but if you add “search within people you’re following” and “search within people who follow you” I promise to love you forever)

@flickr

Only tangentially related, I’m sure Tyler Hawkins aka @flickr has a very busy @replies tab.

What I can’t figure out is if all these folks responding to @flickr are really confused about whether Hawkins is a Flickr representative (he isn’t and doesn’t in anyway suggest he might be) or just believe so strongly that “@flickr” address twits will arrive in Flickr’s inbox that reality is irrelevant.

I’m torn on whether the assumption that when you speak you will be heard is the ultimate arrogance (and one particularly prevalent on Twitter), or if rather this proves that we’ve historically worried too much about URIs and that culture has no problem evolving them ad-hoc.

Now if only I had a thesis, rather then a rambling collection of half thoughts. Which is why I wanted to fit this all into 140 characters. Alas.