An official e-correspondence from the Australian Open, minutes after the 2012 Mens Final concluded, included the following in the opening paragraph: “With the final a worldwide trending topic on Twitter, top seeds Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal produced one of the greatest Grand Slam finals in history..”
Should anyone care whether a topic is a top trend on Twitter? And why? What possible interest could it have to the general public/tennis fan, apart from being a verbal thought bubble along the lines of “We must have put on a good show, because everyone is tweeting about us.”
Sure, the Australian Open marketing department might be interested. In the same way other organisations might be interested in seeing how their publicity stunts are “trending” on Twitter.
But think for a second, between tweets if you have time, about how meaningless the statement is for the reader. Firstly, you don’t know how many people are up (after midnight in Australia) watching and tweeting – it might be a slow tweet day around the world, and thus a few hundred tweets becomes a top Twitter trend. Secondly, you don’t know what the world is tweeting although for some organisations (not necessarily Tennis Australia) any publicity including in the twittersphere is good publicity. But what if they were tweeting along the lines of “this tennis is dead boring, I wish one of these guys would do something interesting apart from pulling at their undies or glaring at their support team”. And if they’ve got time to tweet they’re not riveted to their seats and screens.
Finally, you don’t know who is tweeting – could it be just bored members of the “trending” organisation, or poor Czech students paid to tweet on their behalf?
The only possible value of knowing ‘top twitter trends’ is for lurkers to keep up with the chatterati, and add a tweet of their own to the top topics of conversation out there just to show their face. Do people actually do this?
Please, whatever organisation you’re from – drop the meaningless twitter self-aggrandisement. Don’t tell us how you’re trending in the twittersphere. Keep that to yourself.
C’mon. Give us a break.