The 45-Day Cheese Tweet

It’s morning. Let’s say you’re at your job and maybe you’re looking for a reason not to hate it.

You should check out this story at Business Insider: Inside the 45-Day Planning Process That Goes Into Creating a Single Corporate Tweet.

Didn’t read it? Okay, the gist is there are 13 “social media and advertising specialist” yuppies in a “war room” creating tweets for corporations that have barely any followers.

The author of the story is supposedly an advertising reporter. I can’t tell if they’re striking a tone of “Oh neat” or “Oh dear”. Either way, there are a lot of people walking around out there that think highly of this stuff. The only people that should think highly of it is the ad agency that’s milking this cheese company for all its worth.

Why? Because people really are this insane. It takes me 30 seconds to write a tweet and half that time is spent petting my cat, which, interesting enough could probably garner more Twitter attention.

What I don’t get is that the New York Times can publish a 50-page newspaper every day of the year, even holidays. But these people need 45 days to tweet about cheese.

Clearly we are in the wrong business. Therefore, from now on, SuperPixel is going to be only a tweet generation company. Starting now you can pay us $25,000 every quarter and be guaranteed at least 1.5 tweets.

From the article:

“…met with a copywriter and graphic designer to brainstorm tweet ideas for the next month. It was then that the copywriter suggested a tweet centered on the idea that Camembert, a French cheese popular during the spring, was best served at room temperature.

The copywriter and designer met the next week to create the image for the tweet, which was then pitched at a team meeting… The meeting includes (the social media genius), the copywriter, a designer team, and a project manager.

Then it’s on to an internal review, where senior copywriters and strategists sign off on the work over the course of the following week. The post was then sent to Président Cheese and, some 45 days after conception, published on the internet for the world to see.”

Wait…we’re not charging enough to cover our staff costs. Better make it $45,000 per quarter.

And what was the tweet? This beacon of brilliance they put together?

What’s better is from April 30th to May 14th, the 100 followers of the Camabert cheese account (seriously, who are those 100 people? 99 spammers and 1 Président?), have retweeted it zero times and favorited (excuse me, “engaged”) with it twice.

Unless the plan this whole time was to create a ridiculous 45-day long planning process for a tweet so someone at Business Insider would take note of the ridiculous 45-day process and write about it and get all sorts of free publicity out of it.

It now has 143 retweets and 961 favorites. The Président now has 297 followers, too.

…how generous!


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About JUSTIN HARTER

Justin has been around the Internet long enough to remember when people started saying “content is king”.

He has worked for some of Indiana’s largest companies, state government, taught college-level courses, and about 1.1M people see his work every year.

You’ll probably see him around Indianapolis on a bicycle.

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