Published on 01 September 2014
A few years ago, Simon and I had the idea of tweeting when musicians died. I’m not sure why - the origins are lost in history. We set up a twitter account, @DeadGuys. The name was based on a family joke of mine (now that I think about it, that’s pretty morbid), where we used the term Dead Guys to refer to old dead white Christian theologists my mother was obsessed with teaching about (CS Lewis, Martin Luther, John Calvin, etc, etc).
We tweeted 43 times in the past four or five years.
Today, I deleted this account. Here are some lessons I learned:
- Don’t make anything you wouldn’t feel comfortable telling anyone in your family about, because chances are you probably wouldn’t want to tell other people about it, either. If you’re closer to your friends, well, don’t make anything you wouldn’t tell your friends about.
- When you start a project on Twitter, generally, it’s good to retweet it or at least try to get the word out about it. People do not randomly search for things on Twitter nearly as often as you think they do.
- Don’t make a project that depends on you hearing news tangentially and decided to update it, posteriori. Chances are it won’t update nearly enough to have a life of it’s own.
- Don’t set up a separate gmail account for random accounts like this, because if you forget the password and have forwarding set up, it can get annoying.
- Don’t be disrespectful, of fans, family, or the dead. We didn’t get any flack about this account, but I was never proud of it, because I thought it belittled, in a sense, the work of great musicians. I’m not proud of that.
- Don’t start projects without a purpose. Chances are, you won’t find one later.