There are few things that you could do in this world that would be dumber than attacking Guy Kawasaki on Twitter.
I can’t imagine that it is a smart thing to do as the first post on your new blog either. So let’s make this clear: I’m not attacking Guy Kawasaki, I’m just questioning his choices. As my grade 9 teacher, Mr. Clancy, would’ve said: “I’m not mad at you son, I am mad at what you did”.
First of all, let’s be clear. I have all of Guy’s books, and I have read them each several times. I’m a big fan. However, I don’t agree with everything he has to say. In particular, I take issue with his concept of personal branding.
In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, Guy Kawasaki has openly admitted that he uses several trusted ghostwriters, and he also opens up his personal Twitter feed for his company (Alltop) to use as a marketing tool.
In that interview, Guy lists two people and two corporate blogs that feed into his personal @GuyKawasaki twitter account tweets. They create a lot of “his” content. This raises the question about the difference between Guy’s personal brand and his corporate brand, and it also has a faint odor of an old professor taking credit for his grad student’s work. Should @GuyKawasaki be renamed @TheGuyKawasakiCollective ? Why doesn’t Guy just point to those people’s tweets instead of co-opting/aggregating their stuff under his own name? If, as he says, “re-tweeting is the sincerest form of flattery”, why doesn’t he use that method to share these people’s ideas and work?
Guy wrote me: “It’s better to have my books by only me and tweets by a team than vice versa! 
…Why does it matter who is doing the tweeting? Either the content is good or not good.” My sense is that this isn’t exactly true. When you have multiple authors, quality will be inconsistent. This is true of Guy’s Twitter posts, and it raises the question of the quality of his future books. I think it’s fair to say that his Twitter posts (and aggregation or co-option of other peoples work) are undermining his personal brand.
At first I had difficulty with some of Guy’s posts. I could not reconcile the brilliant business of writing with the dude on Twitter who was writing about some really inane topics. In retrospect, while they showed me a side of Guy that I was not expecting, at least they were authentic posts from HIM.
Surprisingly, I have a deeper connection with Ashton Kutcher now that I’ve listened to him on Twitter. I’ll never meet the guy, but a month ago he posted this video that showed me that the two us actually have a lot in common. We are both kind of goofy sometimes and we both like to annoy our beautiful wives by taking video of them when they’re trying to do other things. It also made me realize that sometimes it must be hard to be a movie star–I wouldn’t want to be away from my wife for several months on end shooting a film.
Guy wrote me: So you think that Oprah, Martha Stewart, and Ralph Lauren write and design everything they put out?
The difference is that I have never really cared what those people wrote! And to a certain extent, I’ve never considered them genuine anyway. I have a funny feeling that Oprah writes most of her own monthly columns though. (Note: attacking Guy’s choices might be risky, but no way would I dare attack Oprah!)
Oprah only writes once a month and personally I would rather read a monthly post to Guy Kawasaki’s blog, than read some ghost-written Twitter posts every hour on the hour.
Guy says that posts by his ghost writers or Alltop have actually driven more positive reaction and then some of his own. This really shouldn’t be very surprising. I would think that an aggregation service should probably appeal to a broader audience than any single news source. The question is not whether not the tweets are good or not, the question is whether the tweets from @GuyKawasaki offer consistent quality, and if he doesn’t even proof-read them, are they his authentic voice?
The most telling comment that Guy makes is that he doesn’t consider Twitter to be a social toy but a marketing weapon. There is no question that it is an effective way for Guy to spread a message, and a great way for him to build a business-making brand. The question is how authentic is this brand, and will I want to read what he’s created? If people really want to listen to a collective then how come @GuyKawasaki has 100,000 followers, but @Alltop has only 3500?
By and large people prefer listening to and conversing with real people, and real brands - not aggregation services. My buddy Mike Troiano has a whole blog about “Branding in the age of social media”…check out www.scalableintimacy.com and let me hear your authentic voice.
I’m Aran Hamilton and you can follow me here and on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/aranh