Tweet 140 – CoxGIGLife and Spam Hype

Ed note: This post is the first of a new feature I’ve had rattling around in my brain for a bit. The idea is to take a recent tweet and expand upon it, but keep in place a length restriction, in hopes that this makes me care about each word I use. Keeping the posts under 140 may mean that I cannot fully examine the topic, and 140 words isn’t even supposed to be long enough for search engines to crawl and index the page, but nonetheless I feel like this will be a good experiment and hopefully a fun lesson in expressing ideas quickly. I hope you enjoy.

Do we actually get facts about #CoxGIGLife, or is this just a bunch of mentions of the hashtag for metrics/fun?

— Ryan Glass (@RyanGPhx) August 8, 2014

I’ve been patiently waiting for Google Fiber to make it to Phoenix.  I was excited when I got the email update a few weeks ago that the City of Phoenix and Google were making solid progress on this front, and I even had a colleague tell me that her decision to stay in Phoenix/Tempe was predicated on the lack of planned availability for Fiber in the ‘burbs.

To be fair, though, I have no problems with my data service from Cox, and they have been increasing my speeds for years at no extra charge. So when I started seeing them advertise for #CoxGIGLife around town, I was cheerful. Then I ran into the wall of tweets from their event this week. In the end, they got up to 25,000,000 impressions, but nearly all of them were selfies with hashtags and no content, facts or reasons to actually read the tweet.

I don’t get it.

Speaking of echo chambers, this hashtracking report is nuts. https://t.co/61KtmkvGs2 25M impressions with only 25% original content.

— Ryan Glass (@RyanGPhx) August 8, 2014

Related articles

• Cox Begins Heavily Marketing 1 Gbps Service That’s Years Away – (dslreports.com)
• The dos and don’ts of hashtags for e-commerce marketing (bigcommerce.com)
• Cox Communications joins Google Fiber and AT&T in the gigabit Internet rollout race (digitaltrends.com)
• Phoenix City Council approves Google ‘network huts’ to bring high-speed Internet (bizjournals.com)