A quick look at the long life of a short quote on brevity

Back in 2018, I was checking my Twitter account, something I don't do very often, and noticed that there was a tweet that mentioned me from someone I did not know. I clicked on it and found this:

At first, I didn't even remember saying that. Then I clicked on the link and it took me to a blog post from a Minneapolis marketing firm called "12 Quotes to Help Motivate you for Epic Digital Marketing."

They somehow found a blurb from a 2016 post I did in the Phoenix business journal: "The 5 C's of effective social marketing."

For the fourth "C" I listed conciseness. And under that heading I simply said:

"Keep it short. No one reads more than the first paragraph. You have 10 seconds, make it count."

After some internet searching, I found that the quote somehow got picked up by a company called MailUp in December of 2016 who compiled "60 (+1) Digital Marketing Quotes to Inspire Your Strategies." This post put me in with people like Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Woody Allen, and a bunch of people whose names I should recognize.

LET ME BE CLEAR, I SHOULD NOT BE LISTED WITH THESE PEOPLE.

I searched some more and found all of these meme's that people put on the Internet, along with a dozen or so uses of the quote in other posts on marketing.

So this is my 15 seconds of Internet fame. My micro-meme on social marketing. The whole thing fascinates me for several reasons. The first is that I had no idea it happened. I write these articles for the Phoenix Business Journal and never know if anyone even reads them. Let alone if they get quoted.

The second thing is how I got identified as a marketing expert. With some actual true experts. People do not check sources. If they did they would have learned that I am an engineer and small business owner who plays at marketing for my company, PADT. But the way it works is one site picks it up and identifies it, then other sites just copy it. Next thing you know it is in a nice font over two Flamingos and you are an excepted expert with an excepted bit of wisdom.

Here we are two years after this discovery and I ran across the meme again while searching for something else. Someone quoted it just 13 days ago on Twitter. Which tells me that people are still resonating with the message.

Makes you wonder about other quotes you read.

And the true irony, … I'm not known for my brevity.

I could go on and on about this topic, but that would sort of defeat the purpose.