As you can tell by the title, this is definitely not a shameless attempt by me to gain followers on Twitter. The point of this column is to spread the word: Twitter is the bomb.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re like, “Twitter is so lame. It makes it so much difficult for me to, like, purport a false image of myself to my acquaintances. Hell, I can’t even get a reasonable estimate of how many people, like, appreciated my post about how much I like Young Jeezy. I was like, ‘Why is nobody “Liking” this? What? Twitter doesn’t even have, like, a “Like” button? I don’t like that.’ ”
Yeah, so word on the street is that Twitter isn’t cool, and if you actively tweet, you either have no tangible social network or really like your American Express card.
But Twitter is starting to become way cool in Iowa City, and I think it’s because of me. It has to be. Two months ago, I decided to create an account as a way of telling the world, “Hey. Twitter’s all right. Chris Steinke created an account.” I have had wild success, soliciting nearly 35 followers. I’m pretty sure that I have also, in some way, inspired the creation of two majorly cool local Twitter ventures: a Tippie M.B.A. scholarship competition and Novel Iowa City.
If you can answer “What makes you an exceptional Tippie M.B.A. candidate and full-time M.B.A. hiring?” better than the other four people that have heard about it, you can win a full financial-award package. The catch: It has to be to Tippie’s graduate program.
If you plan on entering the program this fall, anyway, I would suggest saying how hard of a worker you are and citing your impressive follower/followee ratio. You can save character cap room by placing a hash tag in front of your entire post, which is what Tweeters with broken spacebars do.
If you’re looking for a little inspiration, allow me to suggest browsing Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley’s profile. Nobody’s better at balancing character efficiency with mellifluous and inspirational prose. His July Fourth tweet reads, “Thank God 4 incite our Declaration of Independence writers had for our great republic. Celebrate 4th w thankfulness 4 freedom.” U no I’ll, Chuck. U no I’ll.
Then there’s Novel Iowa City, which is, in my opinion as both a business student and someone who thinks he can write, even cooler. For three days, people around the world are encouraged to tweet something with the hashtag #icbfn. A group of writers will then compile and organize the tweets and attempt to make a logical novel.
I plan on being the first one to contribute to the project, starting at noon on July 15. I’m going to tweet “Once upon a time” and “The end,” and I better get compensated for my art, dammit. Also, don’t steal my idea. It’s plagiarism. I’ll sue you.
If you’re still not sold on Twitter, let me be the first to admit that there are a lot of people who do make Twitter uncool. Don’t follow them.
Unless they’re your friends, in which case that’s your fault for having annoying friends.
If you have a lot of annoying friends, Twitter may not be right for you.
If you want to be a part of an undeniable cultural phenomenon, one that has been used as both a catalyst and an organizational tool for worldwide protests and government upheavals, one that you can custom-taylor to cyber-hand-feed you only the information that you find interesting, Twitter may be right for you.
I hope my column inspired a few of my readers to create a Twitter account to see what it’s all about — unless I have no new followers after this, in which case, screw you all.
