The Tweet Smell of Success: Gene Weingarten on Making the Most of Twitter

Why Gene's Twitter Audience Has Grown

I have just solved one of the thorniest challenges facing many modern businesses, including my own: how to monetize the Web. Without this knowledge, newspapers are dying. The music industry is suffering. Even the fabulously popular online social networking site Twitter hasn't quite figured it out: It's still not pulling a profit despite its millions of users.

Well, I've solved the problem. And, ironically, I did it through Twitter.

It happened almost by accident last month after Twitter got a jolt of great publicity by helping to keep people in touch with each other in Tehran during the street protests over the Iranian elections. Now, this was just swell for human freedom and dignity and whatnot, but it was personally troubling for me. That's because I'm on record deriding Twitter.

So I decided to launch a two-tiered experiment to reestablish that, at its dweeby little heart, Twitter exists primarily to serve individuals with an insatiable appetite for crap. Tier One involved creating a visual Twitter icon for myself that is so disgusting I am not allowed to even describe it here. This immediately won me 50 new "followers" and lost me none, not even the woman who wrote to complain that my icon is the worst thing in the world and she cannot bear to look at it even momentarily, between slit fingers, at a glance.

So far, so good.

Tier Two of my plan involved creating and unleashing a one-day barrage of "tweets" so inane that no one with any personal standards would tolerate it. Once I started, I did not stop for 24 hours. Thus:

"What great general was really constipated? Ulysses S. Grunt."

"What peace activist wore only a loin cloth and dentures, because his teeth had rotted out? Mahatma Candy."

"What U.S. president was sexually insatiable? James K. Poke."

"What African-American inventor developed 300 uses for the taxi meter? George Washington Carfare."

"What inventor developed 300 uses for bull manure? George Washington Carville."

"What great religious leader urged his followers to seek the milk of human kindness? The Prophet Moo-hammed."