Twitter founder responds to media attack and asks what took you so long?

by @gordonmacmillan, posted on 15 April, 2011 at 4:08 pm, filed under Social Media, Twitter and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

In case you missed it, this week Fortune published a long piece on what was going on inside Twitter. It pulled no punches. It told of of “boardroom power plays” and telling of “secret board meetings, executive power struggles, a plethora of coaches and consultants, and disgruntled founders”.

All this it claimed was helping to clip the wings of the tech high flier. One of the founders, Biz Stone, has now responded and asks what took the media so long?

The piece went on to claim that “these theatrics” went well beyond the usual angst at a new venture and had contributed to a growing perception that innovation had stalled and that management was in turmoil. It came in the same week that stories were published on how one of Twitter’s founders had been edged out and failed to get due credit.

The Fortune piece was unusual. Not because those sorts of articles are never written (they are as we all know written often), but unusual in the sense that very few such articles have been written about Twitter. It has led a charmed life when it has come to the media, which has always been eager to write stories about Twitter. Partly one suspects as it has become such a vital day to day tool for the media.

On his blog Biz Stone asks what took so long for somebody to write the article “that says we are falling apart?” That sounds to me like a smart piece of PR. Here’s what he had to say from his blog:

“The normal press cycle is to put a company on a pedestal and then knock it down. It’s much more interesting that way. Twitter has had so many ups and downs you’d think we would have had more negative press. To me, it’s like watching the movie Rocky—he’s up, he’s down, he’s out, he wins!

“Fortune magazine finally stepped up to knock us down with a cover article, “Trouble@Twitter.” Here are some examples of how this works. After mostly positive coverage of Facebook, Fortune finally published an article in April of 2009 titled, “Is Facebook Losing Its Glow?” However, later that year they published, “What Backlash? Facebook Is Growing Like Mad.” Google received similar treatment. In July 2010 Fortune published, “Google, The Search Party Is Over.” Later that year, they published, “Google Continues To Gain Search Marketshare.”

“We’ve had lots of positive press from Fortune in the past. In July of 2010 they published an article titled, “Twitter’s Business Model: A Visionary Experiment.” The article ended with, “Facebook might want to take notes.” It may seem odd, but from my perspective, this means we are being taken very seriously. Twitter is an important company and it’s under scrutiny from journalists—this is exactly how it’s supposed to work. Now it’s our job to prove the reporters wrong so they can write an article later about how we have made dramatic progress.

“The Twitter team is an incredibly dedicated group of people who truly believe they are doing the most meaningful work of their lives. It’s also a very small group of people when compared to the other companies Fortune is investigating. We still have under 500 employees—many of them working weekends and nights to fulfill a potential that is palpable. For a long time, we refused to hire a communications group and now that we have one, I’m having fun teasing them about this Fortune article but the truth is, we’re long overdue to be knocked down by the press.”

It will be interesting to see what happens next as rather than running scared those at the top of Twitter clearly recognise that the company is not perfect. Some things might need to change and as a product it can always improve.