Your Twitter Economy
Monday, June 29th, 2009From Amanda Palmer’s blog:
we hung out for two hours, came up with a list of things that the government should do for us, created a t-shirt (thank god sean was awake and being a loser with me because he throw up the webpage WHILE we were having our twitter party and people started ordering the shirts – that i designed in SHARPIE in realtime) and a slogan: “DON’T STAND UP FOR WHAT’S RIGHT, STAY IN FOR WHAT’S WRONG”
A common interest (minor celebrity) plus the spirit of ‘losers hanging out’ in solidarity, gets routed through Twitter and an insta-website, adding up to an-on-the-fly tribe, and people wanted to commemorate their involvement with a tee shirt, and the whole thing explodes beyond all expectations. Palmer is amazed because it’s far more than her record company has been paying her lately. Well, even insta-tribes need physical symbols of their members’ like-mindedness, a la merchandising at concerts. It’s obvious that Twitter provided the crucial link to turn individuals into a unit that acts collectively. Instant messaging or Facebook wouldn’t have cut it.
The whole thing begs a wash/rinse/repeat: if the ‘tribe’ is unbounded by geography, you can get pretty damn obscure in the ‘common interest’ portion of the package, can’t you? If it doesn’t result in US$19,000 in 10 hours, the dynamic is still compelling. What’s your Twitter economy?
Does this seem like a one-off event? This is a comment on it from Palmer’s blog:
YOU come along and casually start an epic party with a feeling of connection no twenty dollar plus night at the bar desperately trying to find something real could ever bring. Plus, for less cost than a night out I get a shirt personally designed by Amanda Fucking Palmer! LOFNOTC is a microcosm of the power of art to transform the dark spots, big and small, of our lives into something beautiful. The ease and grace in which you transformed thousands of people’s dark spot of being alone on a Friday night into a beautiful communal experience is inspiring beyond words.
LOFNOTC stands ‘Losers Of Friday Night On Their Computers’. Whatever. Who are we to question the allegiances of tribe members, or the quality of their experiences? BTW sometimes the more obscure the interest, the stronger the members’ interest in the tribe. Do you know any geeks whose passion for a framework, platform or language seem to rival their passion for anything else? Yes, you do. Are you supposed to sell them tee-shirts? Maybe not; the point is that something entirely more electric and immediate might be replacing things like forum membership, etc. as the basis for communities whose creation is spontaneous, viral, and possibly temporary.
So one idea here is that online events/parties/gatherings of any kind can have new dimensions to them, with mobile and commercial aspects that turn them into movements or markets as couldn’t have happened before the Twit-frastructure. Twitter has been around for years but we’ve reached a tipping point in large-scale adoption that has the Network Effect kicking in and changing everything.
The larger point is that the tee-shirt sale aspect of this seems to have happened with no planning, almost as a laugh, with Palmer demanding that everyone order (in language you don’t often hear in K-Mart) almost as a joke, that became a brilliant (and BTW free) marketing test:
It’s interesting when the potential of our tools is runs ahead of our ability to easily see how we can apply them. But so many powerful and empowering pieces are in place that that is exactly what is happening.
