Strategize This

Resume padding is the new game in natural selection. Think about it. Animals just trick each other into mating. That peacock with all those feathers could be impotent, but his feathers prevent you from checking if that showing-off is substantiated. It’s the same with resumes. If you tell a lie with the most flash and confidence, the prospective employer will believe you whether or not you actually are an expert in whatever you claimed to be (of course, this analogy also establishes Adam Wheeler as the pinnacle of human evolution). But some pieces of resume fluff popular these days are just unforgivable.

“Social media specialist.” “Twitter expert.” “Twitter strategist.”

All of these are foul and farcical. On one level, I get it. You’re catering to your audience. Most executives are 60-year-old men—they live in a world where “experience using mail merge” is a pretty sweet and high-tech skill set. But in the world of 60-year-old men, the ability to have sex without taking pills is also a rare and coveted skill set. Yet we all have enough dignity not to write that on our resumes.

There is no strategy to Twitter. Don’t believe me? Examine these three emphatically punctuated sentence fragments: A fake Twitter. For a cat. Has over a million followers.

Kudos to you, cat—really—but I must not be bright enough to see the intricately designed strategy behind these posts: “ang ang ang ang ang I THINK I NEED SOME SORT OF SCALE FOR CHEWINESS” and “hup hooo now on couch” seem about as planned out as an Irish Catholic family. What would I do to Twitter strategize that? Compare the ratio of “ang”s to actual words and optimize for most realistic impersonation of cat chewing? Time the chewing post so that it drops at dinner time, to make the post more topical? Agonize over whether to drop another “o” on the end “hooo”?

I would do none of that. I would sit alone in my basement room with my cat and type out of my sad log of his life on Twitter. Because that is what the actual author of this stuff does. And yet over a million people tune in. This is not an example of peerless strategy; it’s an effect of boundless entropy.

But maybe this cat’s an outlier, you say. Fair enough. Let’s look at the Twitter accounts with the most followers: this is a world where Britney Spears beats Barack Obama, where Paris Hilton pwns the New York Times, and—weirdest of all—this is a place where NPR somehow has more followers than Stephen Colbert. Apparently, I’ve really missed out on the pop culture phenomenon that is “The Diane Rehm Show.”

All right, all right. So some of this can be explained away. Britney Spears keeps tighter control of her public image than the president? Too real. Paris Hilton is wealthier and more interesting than The Times? Again, too real. But this has nothing to do with Twitter “strategy.” This has to do with the fact that Britney Spears’s chest is exposed at the beach more often than our President’s is.

Maybe I just don’t get it. Maybe I’m not giving the Twitter strategists enough credit here. Maybe Cat Man did the calculations right: “If you need to post about your life on Twitter, that means you don’t have real friends to tell about your day. That means you’re a loner and loser. Which means you probably are attached to a pet. Like I am to my cat.” Maybe he realized that the nature of Twitter automatically resulted in an audience naturally selected to be losers who would enjoy the musings of a cat, and he capitalized on that. He appealed to the core demographic of the site. That could be true.

So buck up, aspiring Twitter strategists, and learn real things. Get some real skills. And real friends.