Forensic Audits

Enter the Branding of the Billionaire Genius Myth Elon Musk is not a genius, no matter what the media has told us. This “genius” is destroying Twitter because greedy stockholders held him to his bluff to buy the company. As you probably know by now, Twitter is kind of being transformed into X (the announcement could be have been created via ChatGPT?), a company name that Musk has wanted since PayPal. I say kind of for a few reasons. When Musk tried to take down the Twitter signage on the San Francisco office, the SFPD shut it down. X as a trademark is owned by Meta, Microsoft, and many other companies. Close to 900 active trademarks are held in the US Patent and Trademark Office. The Twitter handle X is taken by someone else. Very interesting times indeed. These do not look like the branding moves of a genius. What’s in a Name? Billions of Dollars! The media propped this man up as some genius, but clearly he doesn’t know the value of the Twitter brand. Brand agencies and analysts estimate that Twitter’s brand value ranges from $4 billion to $20 billion. Twitter was created in April 2006, so to flush down all that value, starting from the iconic logo to some already copied, poorly conceptualized, inaccessible font. Inside Twitter HQ in San Francisco, it was down with the bird and up with the X: The co. is projecting the X logo in the cafeteria and changed conference room names […]

The other day, I saw this tweet from the Catholic TV channel EWTN and was surprised: “For Lent, I’m giving up…” (finish with predictive text) pic.twitter.com/BzAFz9tVt3 — EWTN (@EWTN) February 11, 2020 I was a little shocked that this got into my timeline from people who are probably closer to pagan than Catholic. But it caught my eye just like that Variety tweet did during the Oscars. I had to double check to see if this was the same EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network) I knew back from when I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. And it was! On the way to church with my family, through long winding roads up in the hills, we would pass by the TV station. I never would have thought that this most likely not well known religious channel would have a viral tweet. But they used a pretty common type of meme to do it: the predictive text meme. You can call it a sort of divination, or a just a way to have fun, but according to Know Your Meme, predictive text as a meme has been around on Twitter for a few years. So if you’re been on Twitter for any amount of time, then you’ve probably seen these memes before. But this was the first time I had seen a brand use a predictive text meme. And just like with Variety, I would not expect EWTN to use a meme or popular culture for their social media feeds. (They used […]

After being on and off social media since 1997, sometimes I’m still shocked at its power. I should have written about this on the 10th, but you’ll be reading this on the 26th, 16 days after this happened. ON Sunday, February 9th, I watched people on Twitter watch the Oscars. That’s because 1) I didn’t want to actually watch the very monochromatic Oscars and 2) it’s more fun to watch people watch TV than to watch TV. Still, despite the near whiteout conditions of the Oscar nominees, I was only rooting for two people: Matthew Cherry, whose film “Hair Love,” was nominated for Best Animated Short film; and Parasite, a Korean film up for a few awards including Best International Feature Film and Best Picture. Cherry won, which was lovely. And Parasite won four Oscars: Best Picture, Directing (by Bong Joon Ho), International Feature Film, and Writing (Original Screenplay). My timeline was intensely ebullient with each win. Seemed like everyone was hoping against hope that Parasite would win Best Picture. When Parasite did win, it was a Super Bowl type of synchronous excitement. Here’s a tweet that caught me off guard. #PARASITE FADSJKFDASLKJFALJKFASELJKDFSAKJLFDSAKJLADFXJKLFDSAJKDFASKJLASFDJKLFDASJKLFSDAJKLFJKL@#JK@RKWEFKJLFWEAJKL WE DID IT KIDS!!!!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/cY2VaNAAwZ — Variety (@Variety) February 10, 2020 Variety as a publication has been around for eons and their Twitter page is usually quite sedate. They report entertainment news. The reports are not typically salacious. It’s Variety. So when this tweet came through, I lost it while everyone else was losing it. I couldn’t […]