Thursday, March 19, 2009

Fail the whale! Twounce the tweeters!

The economy has been murdered.

No, the butler didn't do it. It was Twitter.


THAT'S THE STARTLING conclusion from a Harvard business professor who has found an eerie correlation between skyrocketing Twitter use and nosediving American productivity figures.

Basically, when the American worker is tweeting, he isn't working. And the Harvard Business School professor, Martin Schmeldon,
thinks the effects have been cataclysmic in terms of capital destruction:

Employees who might otherwise be working productively and contributing to the economy can instead create Tweets, such as "I just realized I clipped all of my nails today except for one" or "My co-worker is drinking pepsi . Pepsi!!! I want some. Stupid Lent" or "Financial systems require high levels of trust and oversight. Take away the oversight and encourage high levels of risk for personal gain."

Large companies are shifting marketing budgets over to social media marketing initiatives that promise to quadruple revenues. For example, Comcast is an active Twitter user and tweets things like "@xyz, relooking at the picture it looks to me to be the box. The reason I say that is the bar is messed up too. I would hard reboot."

"The problem is that many of the marketers at these large companies really want to have some Twitter experience on their resume, so they are subverting dollars that might actually go to positive NPV projects," comments Schmeldon. "Twitter may be the largest contributor to public company value destruction that I've seen since we moved away from mark-to-market accounting rules back in 1982."
ANOTHER EXPERT thinks Congress will have to act quickly. And that may involve conjuring up the "fail whale," which, in the Twitter universe, tells tweeters the microblogging service is offline.

Beltway insider and renowned economic advisor, West Tirrettia, believes Schmeldon's study could have some implications for economic policy that comes out of the current legislative session. "Congress has duly taken note of this research," said Tirrettia. "We may see some Twitter moratoriums coming in future stimulus bills. It's really just a question of whether lawmakers are willing to put their necks out against something that has become very popular back home in their constituencies."
INDEED, SOMETHING will have to be done. And killing Twitter might be just the start of a serious movement to save the United States' economic infrastructure.

Next up? Some foresee a federal injunction against the NCAA to ban the college-basketball championship tournament, popularly known as "March Madness." More like "GDP Madness," if you ask this observer.

Other possibilities might involve restrictions on good-looking women in the workplace, as well as the removal of sound cards from all computers where audio is not essential to the function, as well as criminalizing the surfing of porn sites during work hours.

Finally, some experts say lame-ass attempts at tomfoolery such as this post also will have to go.

DO YOU THINK
tech writer Guy Kawasaki might have taken the Twitter "story" for anything but some twick or tweetery on the Internets? Then again, the way some people tweet about absolutely any fool thing -- all the time -- you do have to wonder.

Am getting up to drink some water now. Probably will pee later.

2 comments:

Fearsome Pirate said...

We need Congressional action because it's clearly impossible for any company to block Twitter from its computers, the way they block blogspot, gmail, yahoo, youtube...

The Mighty Favog said...

Errrr . . . Fearsome? It was all a joke.

I just went along with an online joke, then ADMITTED I was playing along with the online joke. There isn't any percentage in critiquing proposals made in jest.