Readers of TechCrunch are complaining that the company writes too much about twitter.
The TechCrunch article entitled ‘Lance Armstrong: Natural Born Twitterer caught my eye. Not that I am an Armstrong groupie by any means, but I am an avid cyclist with a great amount of respect for any Tour de France competitor especially for a guy that has won the world’s most infamous cycling race, 7 times, but also because I’m an avid technologist and twitter junkie.
This article is clearly about Lance and how he uses technology to build his corporate brand, in this case twitter. The article is written well with a decent Q & A format. I enjoyed the content and liked the way Lance answered the questions. I totally related to Lance’s reply “I’ve been around too long to BS people”
I finished reading the article and moved onto reading the comments. I love blog post comments. I find people ’s opinions and thoughts very interesting. Sometimes I walk away with more satisfaction from reading the comments than the article itself.
I was a bit surprised with what others had to say.
Here are some excerpts from the articles comments:
…enough of twitter, for god’s sake…
…I double that! But more importantly, who gives a shit about this useless article?? Are you gonna write an article about everyone famous on Twitter?…
….It’s my belief that there’s a massive PR campaign to hype up twitter, so it can be acquired by one of the big players ie Google…
…You have always posted about Twitter. But now this is getting insane!! We love Twitter too, but give us a break!!…
…TechCrunch needs to really move away from Twitter related posts and get back to the normal way they update this blog…
…twitter, twitter , twitter …. it seems you get BIG MONEY , i was reading you for more than a year , go write for your boss … i will not read it…
Not every comment had a “get over twitter” tone. There are quite a few praising the article and the choice from TechCrunch to deliver information about the latest and hottest tech trends. One reader wrote:
Getting the real story behind the use of twitter is good journalism. A personal brand like Armstrong, how he uses twitter, personal philosophies, and why he does it – very well written.
The conversation brought up a few things to ponder:
What is proper commenting etiquette?
Should of these concerns been addressed with TC directly, submitted to the company and not the ‘Guest Author’?
Will TechCrunch respond with another article written about Twitter? That would be sort of ironic in this situation.
It will be interesting to see if TechCrunch loses a few readers because they write too much about twitter, but what blog following social media tech trends isn’t writing about twitter? I agree with some the comments, hearing about twitter 24/7 does become a bit annoying after awhile and there are other companies doing some really cool stuff in the social media realm. Check out intensedebate.com or lijit.com for example.
I have come away with a few lessons, or should I say ‘reminders’ from this.
- Listen to your readers, after all you are writing for them.
- Write about Hot topics but be aware of your frequency.
- If something catches fire, you quickly need to make a decision, let it burn OR put it out.
I guess we will see what TechCrunch decides to do.
