October 6, 2022
I do not have a large social media following, I do not know lots of people, and I don’t consider myself especially talented or even interesting.
Despite that, I believe authenticity on the internet is very important. I like to think that if you follow me on twitter and then met me in-person, you’d feel that those two identities are very similar. As such …
I believe it’s deeply inauthentic to have people ghost write your tweets or blog posts.
Being inauthentic on the internet is the worst because it implies you believe that your audience are suckers. That they wouldn’t notice that you’re phoning it in by not doing the work.
Why does this matter? David Ulevitch tweeted this:
At first read of this, I thought — why? No one knows who the CEO of a startup is, so having a random employee send the update vs. the CEO seems moot. To be clear, I adore product updates, and whilst I do write them today, nothing would make me happier than seeing other people also write those updates!
Someone mused something similar in response to this tweet, and David replied:
I feel this is where we stepped into lunacy — and the reason why I discussed authenticity earlier. A CEO should be authentic to their interests and either care about the updates themselves, or delegate the task to someone else. Asking someone else to write product updates on their behalf is the worst of both worlds.
I believe that David even hit the nail on the head here:
When I get an email from someone, and I hit reply, I expect that person to reply — if I get a product update email, and I reply, and it goes to a Zendesk helpdesk and/or some other employee replies — it shatters the illusion of authenticity.
We’re talking about stories not scripts. Stories are interactive! Audiences should be encouraged to reply to product updates and discuss them. It makes zero sense for the person allegedly telling the story to be unable to answer questions about the story they’re telling.