A short YouTube livestream commentary by TJ Walker (Oct 2015) analyzing Donald Trump’s effective use of Twitter. Walker argues Trump gains attention by continuously initiating and sharing ideas himself rather than relying solely on PR teams; consistent idea-generation and frequent provocative messaging—without needing to be abrasive—are key to attracting both social and traditional media attention.
Chapters
Huge story in today's New York Times about how Donald Trump is the master of Twitter. Donald Trump getting a lot of attention, as he always seems to, in the so called traditional media, because of his mastery of Twitter. What lessons can other people draw from this? Well, folks, I'm not here to defend or praise Donald Trump. That's not what this column is about, or this YouTube channel or this website. But there are certain things he does well that other people can learn from. So let's forget about the particular politics and policy positions of the moment. For one thing, Donald Trump is good at Twitter simply because he is initiating a constant stream of ideas. Forget about what those ideas are for the moment he's initiating. Now, apparently sometimes he dictates to staff and they'll type it, but many times it's late at night, early in the morning, he is typing it himself. The problem, many CEOs, business executives, political leaders, is they're so used to farming that out to the PR team. The PR staff, the people who are the absolute best in the world at primary, are constantly initiating ideas. Now, they may have a great PR team behind them, supporting them, helping them, initiating ideas too, but they still are constantly putting forth new ideas. That's one of the strengths Donald Trump has. In fact, for decades he would brag that he didn't even have a PR team. He didn't use any PR firm. He was just all Donald. You can take that for a grain of salt. But there is no doubt that, that his ideas, if you want to call them that, are his ideas. And he is constantly initiating. So one of the great strengths or one of the great factors of making anyone good at Twitter these days and social media is the ability and the willingness to simply spend the time thinking of ideas to say and pushing them out. I'm not suggesting you have to say things as frequently as obnoxious as Donald Trump has. But you can't simply wait for your PR team every two months to come up with some perfect, full focus group tested message. It has to be a steadier stream. That's why Donald Trump has shown there's this huge division of social media versus traditional media. What Donald Trump shows is at some level there is no difference. If you're willing to stand up and say provocative things on a regular basis. It really doesn't matter if it's the New York Post 25 years ago or Twitter in 2015, you're going to get attention. Now, is attention the only goal? No. Do you want to hold yourself to higher standards and not run around calling people rapists. I'm assuming most of you do. But still, the standard for you is you've got to constantly initiate interesting ideas, figure out how to make them provocative to people. They don't have to be demagogic, they don't have to be attacking and calling people morons and idiots and fools. But if you want attention in the old media world or the new media world, nothing beats a constant stream of new ideas.
