Maureen Dowd in The New York Times reported today that Hillary Clinton has started tweeting. If anything screams twitter is no longer hip, this is it. Time to move on and search for the ‘next big thing’. In New York, a new restaurant or club can be hip and trendy and attract all the ‘right people’, but only for so long. Eventually, the word gets out and the place starts to get populated by what we call the B&T crowd – that is, bridge and tunnel – that is, people from New Jersey and Long Island. When that happens, it is time to move on. Now Hillary, the B&T Crowd for online media has arrived. Likewise, time to move on. Her ‘first tweet’ was over produced, over agonized over (if that is a word) and edited and redacted and probably focus-grouped to death. All of this is, in many ways, antithetical to the essence of the spontaneity of Twitter or any social media. This is no surprise, at least to me. Way back in 2007 (hard to believe), Lisa and I were guests at a Hillary Clinton for President fundraiser on Long Island. For a mere $10,000 we got dinner with Bill and Hillary (and about a hundred other people), and, for our ten grand, got about 15 seconds with Hillary. (Lisa also got to sit next to Bill for the desert course. (I don’t think he has been in touch with her since then.. I don’t think..)) At any rate, when we got our 15 seconds, we thought we should use them to the max – so Lisa said, (while shaking Hillary’s hand), “the video on your website sucks”. When you only have fifteen seconds you don’t have a lot of time to get to the point. This clearly got Hillary’s attention. “What?” she asked. We repeated that her online video ‘sucked’ (which is did). In a flash we were off to an impromptu meeting with Huma Abedein, Hillary’s assistant (who would later be married to Social Media Genius Anthony Weiner). Seated at a small table, Huma, pen and paper in hand, asked us what we meant. “Her video is terrible”, we said. “She should be all over Youtube”. Huma looked at us. “Youtube?” We explained what Youtube was. Huma wrote down U-Tube. “No…”, we said, “Youtube”. She wrote it down. “I will have to look into this”, she said. We were hoping for some kind of massive video media contract with the Clinton campaign. At least then our ten grand wouldn’t be totally wasted. It was. However, a few months later we did get a call from Huma. They had taken our advice, she said. They were doing their own video. In fact, Hillary was going to have her first video ‘webcast’ on the site later that day. We should ‘check it out’. We did. At 3PM, Hillary came ‘live’ on her campaign website. She was dressed in pearls, seated on a couch behind a large bookcase – shot with 3 cameras; network lighting. She announced that she was going to answer questions ‘live’ – questions that had to be emailed into the site. Then, the camera cut to another assistant, seated in a giant wingback chair with a laptop. She smiled and said “Hillary, here is our first question…” and proceeded to read it. Measured, controlled, scripted and highly directed. We wrote to Huma and said ‘the campaign still does not really get it’. Huma never wrote back. I guess $10,000 only goes so far. Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2013
