Thread by @HoarseWisperer

Oh, hey, now that I’ve laid out my whole backstory of working in communications strategy, let’s have a hearty laugh at the bumbling incompetence that led to this discussion.

I’ve been laughing for a month.

1/

Back in early August, the Bernie campaign came up with the idea of pushing people to record and publish videos of their “Bernie Stories”.

They were supposed to be poignant personal vignettes of how Bernie taught them to love again and blah blah blah.

2/

I wrote a single tweet using the campaign’s hashtag.

It generated 15k likes - far, far more than nearly any of the real ones - and got picked up by Brian Williams on MSNBC.

3/

That made Bernie’s two senior communications people super duper extra mad.

It’s a conspiracy! The deep state is out to get Bernie! Hoarse is a rogue actor backed by evil forces! We must dox him!

4/

So they revved up angry dumbalinas to “come after me” and out the deep secret that I worked in marketing.

Note: I talked about working in marketing and communications numerous times but let’s just pretend it was a secret. It’s better that way.

5/

Then they suggested some secret cabal of haters must have engineered my tweet being read on air.

Umm, you dumb putzes, it was literally one of the most popular tweets on your dumb hashtag.

6/

Anyway, back to our story, as it turns out, Bernie’s people apparently don’t know shit about communications because if they did, they would have known that a campaign of “user-generated brand endorsements” was the dumbest idea in every agency brainstorm between 2005 and 2010.

7/

“Oh my god! I’ve got it! Let’s get a lot of people to record a video of how much they love Tide’s new Bacon n’ Springtime fabric softener and we’ll promote them all!

That’ll really get people talking!”

8/

Those campaigns never actually “get people talking.”

1) They’re super labor intensive.

2) The coordination makes them feel inorganic and inauthentic

3) Nobody watches the videos

And most importantly:

4) It only takes one response lampooning the effort to tank the whole thing

They are a tremendously dumb idea.

Any effort to “make something go viral” is generally a dumb idea.

Things go viral organically. They don’t go viral because a client really, really wants them to.

If Bernie had any comms talent on staff, they’d know this.

10/

So, my one tweet threw a wrench in the dumbest campaign communication effort of the year...

And its engineers naturally blamed that on...

Uh. Me.

11/

Now let’s just run with that one.

Let’s assume I truly was an evil genius and not a dude on a couch.

If I were your adversary, would you really want to make me more famous by throwing a hissy about me?

12/

Of course not.

It is the very height of political incompetence to spotlight a critic. All it does is raise their profile and amplify their criticism.

Bernie’s campaign drove 15k more followers to my account while looking like petulant babies.

Genius.

13/

So in review, Bernie’s campaign came up with the kind of idea people inside ad agencies violently roll their eyes over... and it went exactly as those ideas go... and they had no idea it was their own fault... so got me a mention in Rolling Stone.

14/

I am *literally* a fucking guy in a pair of flip-flops writing whatever the hell I want on Twitter. Yet, the campaign of a prominent candidate for President of the United States so lost their shit over one of my tweets, they wet their pants for weeks.

You can’t make this up.

//

p.s. I never particularly cared about being anonymous.

I made up a screenname when I joined. It stuck. So I stuck with it.

If I had valued being anonymous, I wouldn’t have left so many breadcrumbs that made it possible to figure out who I am.

Another thing Berners got wrong.

p.p.s. If Tide ever introduced Bacon n’ Springtime, I would absolutely wash my clothes in it.