Well,
Twitter, it was nice knowing you.
I
guess.
Recent
article says the concept of paying to use the social media platform,
which had been mentioned but was not a fully understood presentation
of a future business model for it, is beginning to roll out. Honestly,
it’s going to be roughly one dollar per year. At least to start.
I say roughly because it’s apparently arrived in a few different
countries, with the Philippines and New Zealand kicking it off.
And a buck isn’t really that bad. But there are a lot of other
things at work here.
Should
we start with the name?
X.
I
don’t get it. Hey, if you own it, and want to call it something
different, change it up and have fun. I’m not going to try to
stop you, and you don’t need to please me anyway. What I will
say is that I seem to have learned over the years that brand recognition
tends to mean something when you’re in business. Has value. So,
when you change a fairly well-known name, and add in a pay wall,
it sure seems like you are moving down a new path. In fact, two
possibilities scream to the top of the thoughts:
First
– least likely – New name, pay setup installed, and most everything
else stays somewhat on autopilot without changes.
Second
– more likely – There are waves of changes on the way and we are
simply being treated to the first ripples. If the business model
is going to work, and the company is going to recover from a variety
of reports that outline staggering losses and internal struggles,
the resulting product is quite unlikely to look, act and behave
anything like it has until now. In short… the yellow, waddling,
quacking duck we had identified is about to be blue with a bark.
(The vision of a still in place waddle is up for debate.) If it
no longer looks like a duck or quacks like a duck, is it still
a duck?
Many
years ago, the California Angels changed their name. At first,
they went with their home and switched it to the Anaheim Angels.
Not much you can argue with there, with the exception of tradition.
But, fairly quickly, they changed it again.
The
Los Angeles Angels.
Wait?
Los Angeles? Today it probably just seems normal to you. The Los
Angeles Angels. It’s what you know. But it really hasn’t been
that long. And they hadn’t moved. Instead, it was to lean into
city recognition, with the idea of incorporating a major city.
At least, more major than Anaheim. Yup. Public relations and marketing.
Initially, though, they needed more. The team you know of as the
Los Angeles Angels have only been the Los Angeles Angels for a
handful of years. The organization didn’t want to upset Anaheim,
which they had and did and continue to call their home. So, it
wasn’t the Los Angeles Angels when they moved on from the Anaheim
Angels name, simple and clean. It became the clunky and awkward
Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
Eventually,
clunky and awkward was replaced. Not by tradition. By marketing.
Los Angeles Angels it is. (See how easy it is to change a name?)
I
generally refer to them as the California Angels. Yes, there are
some that make claims going back to days when there was a team
playing in the Pacific Coast League called the Los Angeles Angels.
But that organization got swept away in the move of the Brooklyn
Dodgers. I hold to the tradition of my childhood. And… well…
If
you follow the bouncing ball—or, I suppose, bouncing baseball—the
idea here is that nothing that changes drastically ever seems
to change for the reasons in the press release. There’s often
something slightly askew and twisted, a shift of perspective,
involved. Slightly askew and twisted tends to bring with it a
need to act, react, respond and reconfigure. This is not to say
things don’t change for the better… many times, they actually
do. Instead, we need to recognize that some change is simply the
first shoe dropping with a second drop yet to come.
Twitter
is changing. Gone, really. X now.
That
might turn out to be a good thing over time. At least for the
business. For me though, today, I think it’s a sign that I need
to find other social media platforms that better suit my needs.
Figuratively, I don’t think this method of transportation will
be headed in the same direction for much longer.
Then
again, if a social media outlet exists but no one ever says its
name, does the name really matter? Tune in over the weeks to come
and I suppose we’ll find out together.