Why Larry Johnson of the Kansas City Chiefs didn't see this coming is surprising. He took out his frustration with his coach and the fans on Twitter, and guess what, the Chiefs released him today.
It's not the first time someone has been fired from posting personal thoughts in a public forum, but now that it has happened in the NFL, maybe people will realize that people are actually reading this stuff. Beware kids. Twitter is not a toy.
Thanks to Duane Hoffmann / msnbc.com for the image.
I had lunch with Jonathan Ardrey the other day. We talked about lots of stuff including social media. He observes that young people want to know that there's another
human being behind the marketing messages they engage with.
These days we talk a lot about "integrated" communications and "digital" communications, but I think it's easy to overlook "fluency". If you're fluent in a language, it often means there's a faster, tighter, more human connection between a word and an actual emotion. I think the same is true for the internet. There are some people who are fluent, some people who are trying really really hard to learn it, and others who simply look on it as a foreign language. We know that it's increasingly more difficult for someone to become "fluent" in a language as they grow older, but not totally impossible. They may just never lose their accent... It's very easy to spot who gets this "new" media and who doesn't and it often comes down to a question of fluency. Those who get it, use all the different media in the way a native speaker uses the correct phrases and terminology. Because at the end of the day, digital is not "cold" for young people - they expect there to be a real person at the other end and they can sense that person's human warmth in the margins of the communications. Humans make mistakes, apologize, share more than they probably should over the "social" internet. And at the end of the day, there's a natural humanity and fluency to many, if not most of, popular blogs/facebook profiles/etc. And it's that humanity that brands need to find. It's not just a point of view anymore it's a whole persona.
I think this also starts to explain the draw of what Hugh Macleod of gapingvoid.com calls "microbrands." They're really just individual people whose ability to communicate has been scaled up by the internet and now reaches a larger and larger audience. Brands weren't fast enough to react, so something had to fill the void.
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