Why #RIPTwitter Sentiment is Shortsighted

I spent a lot of time like a lot of people on Super Bowl Sunday afternoon on Twitter. Four hours of my time was on the platform while watching the big game and the TV ads that come with it. During the ads I noted something that many endorsed because it ended getting Retweeted by a few folks:

The most telling analysis in the world of business is the reaction by people that something is "over," or that a competitor has no way of bringing down the Goliath. I hear this all the time when I mention I work for Bing Ads. People in tech and non-tech alike are quick to say, "Why don't you just give up, you're never going to win, you're never going to dominate or be the go to solution," (I'll be honest, I've gotten expletive-laden tweets too but I like to keep my posts family-friendly). What several people don't seem to understand is the nature of the new norm in which we live, work and play that allows many businesses to fail but also many to come from behind or out of nowhere to dominate.

Technology and the mobility of humanity have allowed businesses to be unconventional and sprint ahead of others even when audiences think they may have slipped behind and are goners. And when they do slip behind? They can still catch up. They can still pivot. They can still become relevant again. Because it is creativity and cognitive thinking that allows for this to happen. Technology doesn't necessarily help companies become more powerful as much as the cognitive capital within those organizations. 

When I first got onto a social network in 2004 it was two platforms. One was LinkedIn. The other was Friendster. When asked by someone which platform I thought would be around in 10 years I noted to everyone, "Oh Friendster by far! LinkedIn is silly, I mean I'll use it to job network but beyond that it will probably never be as massive as Monster. Besides, everyone loves social networks and communicating openly with friends."

Re-read that statement again and think of when you said a company or a trend or a movement was "done and tired and we should stick a fork in it."

Then think of all the times you've been proven wrong.

Also think about what I noted in terms of communicating with people you only know. What makes social networking beautiful isn't just connecting with mom, dad, sister, brother, cousin, girlfriend, friend, co-worker, etc. but people you don't know who you want to meet and converse but may never be able to because you don't live in the same geographic location.

While critical examination of business is a given because anyone and everyone can be an armchair critic (or I should say smartphone critic as they type snarkily onto the feed of their choice), many times the critics don't understand what a business strategy is, how a company is going to monetize, how mass scale is antiquated and that not everything has to be growth hacked to 7 billion users to be effective or a winner with the users who love using that technology or platform.

Chris Anderson noted in his decade old book, "The Long Tail," that the future of commerce is selling less of more. In other respects, what Anderson was getting at in the book is that not one platform would necessarily be the dominant platform in a world weaving and blurring together into a collaborative mass.

So when I read things like #RIPTwitter because people fear change, what scares me more isn't that Twitter might one day be gone (I don't think it will) but more of the fact people resist and fear change of any kind. Before we go nuts about what the change in the algorithm does to the user experience of our feeds, let's be patient to see what the UX actually is like. Let's wait to see what 10,000 word tweets may look like (it's probably going to link to a publishing platform ala Medium but even I don't know yet). 

The biggest takeaway from my Sunday night experience is Twitter has a place in this world just like many platforms from Bing to Firefox to Snapchat to Tumblr to Instagram to whatever comes next based on our evolution in behavior. 

Instead of fearing change, let's embrace it and see what it may deliver. Without change, progress and innovation doesn't exist. As Charles Darwin so eloquently noted:

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change."

Geoffrey Colon is a communications designer at Microsoft where he works on the Bing Ads search advertising product. Follow him here on LinkedIn or Twitter. Listen to his podcast Disruptive FM and purchase a copy of his upcoming book Disruptive Marketing: What Growth Hackers, Data Punks, And Other Hybrid Thinkers Can Teach Us About Navigating The New Normal out on AMACOM Books this August.