The Five People You Tweet In Heaven

Nick Douglas‘ Twitter Wit is a compendium of what he bills as “the funniest tweets of all time,” so the top five from those should be hi-larious. Right? Eh, you can decide that for yourself, but the point is, Douglas and publisher Harper Collins picked their five favorite Tweets from the book  for a new promotion, which is about as un-Twitter as it gets: Inviting people to make a video based on one of those tweets. The filming! The editing! The uploading! Geesh, 140 characters never sounded so time-consuming. The winner gets Winner gets an iPod touch and a copy of Twitter Wit; three runners-up get a copy of the book and, I guess, the glory.

• Whether or not these are the five funniest tweets or just easiest to put on film is for you to decide – the point is, this is yet another example of book-publishing viral content, the new drop-dead necessity of the industry unless you’re Dan Brown and you sell a million copies on your first day. Instead of goofy YouTube videos, he gets movies starring Tom Hanks. But for the rest of us – including bestselling authors like A.J. Jacobs (viral vid here) or Emmy-winning comedy writers like David Javerbaum (viral vid here) — there now exists the ironclad imperative to whip up secondary content in the hopes of going viral, or even viral-ish.

So! The Five People You Tweet In Heaven? The Twitter Wit version is probably gonna be very different from the David Pogue version, but here they are:

• michaelianblack: “When people pick their “5 people living or dead to have dinner with,” don’t they worry they’ll be the most boring person at the meal?”
• azizansari: “Made it rain at the club last night. Thought people grab all the money and give it back so you can throw it again. Not how it works I guess.”
• pagecrusher: “Why aren’t martini glasses shaped so that they don’t spill so easily on the bus?”
• fireland: “Why should I be the one to take the kids to see their psychologist? I don’t even love them!”
• thepeoplegeek: “Cranked the treadmill up to MAX for 15 minutes. When I finally took a break my roller skates were hot to the touch.”

(For the record, I think my entry in the book is pretty funny… funny because it’s true.)

So! What do we learn from this? That endless content is to be had from breaking out lists from larger collections (“The Five Best Lists of Lists From The Past Five Years of Lists!”). That having a Twitter-based contest without a Twitter address anywhere on the page – or a hashtag, for that matter – is pretty ironic.  That creating interactive online content is an essential tool of good marketing.

To that end, I invite you to leave in the comments your own list of The Five People You Tweet In Heaven, because I’m a little meh on this list. Pretty sure we can do better. Also, I would like to create some viral content that I can then break out into separate lists for yet more viral content. And also because I really, really wanted to use the headling “The Five People You Tweet In Heaven,” because amazingly, no one seems to have used it yet. FIRST!

That’s all. Your call for the funniest peeps on Twitter  in the comments below, please. Or you can write, shoot, edit and upload a YouTube video, but that probably means you have a little too much time on your hands.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.