Social Media Life Lessons: Ghost of a Chance at Authenticity

who is “moritherapyi”? was that the wine?

“I could sum this up, but I’d rather let you read it in its entirety. A little background: prior to today, Mark Davidson was just another of those ‘follow tens of thousand and tens of thousands will follow you’ generic internet marketers, although somewhat more prosperous than most; prosperous enough, in fact, to hire three ghost writers for his Twitter account.”

You write this as though you actually know something about my background. What you leave out is that I’ve been writing the same way on my personal Twitter account for years… And I don’t use my personal account as a marketing vehicle. I use it as a personal Twitter account.

For the last 4 years, I’ve referenced having a team of writers, ghost writes among other various forms of schtick. I once even wrote as an actual social media guru. Emphasis on the “guru”. It was very spiritual. Another time I posed as the social media manager for Foxconn and tweeted about my depression… It goes on and on. 4 years of various schtick, satire and parody. None of it meant to harm anyone. All in good fun. Through my posts, I developed a rather sizable following. Partly based on the humor I deploy and the tweets I post about writing status updates that grab and maintain attention, create response, and drive web traffic. (Something that I do quite well.)

Unfortunately, you and many others discovered my 4-year old Twitter account and without doing any research first, decided to deploy a combination of confirmation bias and hasty generalization.

Yes, I’m the ghost writer. People who follow me know I don’t have a need to hire others to do it for me. Hence the ironic humor. With a little research or had you followed me for any length of time, that could have been obvious.

Most people who wrote about it, knew it was a joke from the start but couldn’t overlook the traffic value of the story and spun it in a way that worked for their web properties. I get the sense from your words that you did not and took it as an opportunity to put someone else down, to make yourself look better.

I find that unfortunate. One thing I never do with my personal accounts is to use my words to harm others. Instead, I choose to entertain, fascinate, educate and have fun. As TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters called it, “just too funny not to share.” And the posts were funny. Particularly putting up the Help Wanted tweet a few hours later.

Sincerely,

“The Ghost Writer” or Mark Davidson
(Well, somebody surely wrote this. It didn’t just post itself.)