How To Get 50,000 Twitter Followers By Mastering Memes

How to get 54,000 Twitter followers:
1. On the day of the infamous Hobby Lobby SCOTUS decision, tweet a photo of yourself standing in front of the Hobby Lobby wearing a "Pro-Life" T-shirt and holding a Chick-Fil-A cup.
2. Soon afterwards, tweet a photo of yourself standing in front of an American flag while you hold a gun and a Bible.

Incidentally, when the local conservative media reported on these viral tweets and the 20-something ultra-conservative Nitro woman who did the tweeting, they told us only that  she was a mom and the wife of a military man. They didn't tell us she had a communications degree from Marshall University and that she worked for Cabell County Schools. Did she learn meme mastery from Marshall? 

How to get 3,000 MORE Twitter followers:
1. Have your affair with a Tea Party staffer reported by a fellow conservative activist. The activist who reported your affair is hated and reviled. You get 3,000 more twitter followers.

Local conservative media didn't report the affair nor did they report if she learned meme mastery from her Tea Party Paramour. 

Besides the fact that conservatives don't demand that their icons actually live what they claim to believe so long as they "make liberals' heads explode", what else do these Twitter-related facts teach us?

I say these facts teach us that Twitter success is about meme mastery and meme multiplication. Whether the Nitro meme queen learned meme mastery from Marshall or her Tea Party paramour, she certainly put on a how-to-use-Twitter clinic for the rest of us.  

Who else do you know in Nitro or Kanawha County who has 57,000 Twitter followers? Let's put this number in perspective. The Nitro meme queen has 10 times more Twitter followers than Governor Tomblin and twice as many as Senator Joe Manchin. 

The cheating Nitro meme queen's Twitter success reminds me of some advice I once gave to an Australian atheist who emailed me to ask how he could make a living being an atheist. I was only half-kidding when I told him to do the following:
1. Start lampooning and ridiculing iconic Australian religious figures and institutions and pray to the god you don't believe in that at least one of these high-profile religious figures or institutions returns fire. Write letters to the editor of Australian newspapers, start parody accounts on social media, use every means of communication at your disposal to mock and deride religion and its symbols in Australia.
2. When one of your targets answers your attacks, make sure every newspaper and TV station know about it. 
3. Start an organization with a bank account in its name and ask fellow atheists to send money so you can fight back against your well-financed religious attackers. When the checks start coming in you will be a paid, professional atheist. And as I once said in my deeply-flawed, unpublishable novel, pretty soon you and the religious symbols you attack and are attacked by in return have a symbiosis. You schedule public debates, you write op-eds against each other and, of course, both the professional religionists and your atheist org  use the feud in fundraising appeals. Everybody wins.

Will a liberal meme queen arise to become the sort of anti-Nitro-meme-queen? I don't know but I admitted a blogger into my Blog Zone group this morning who might have the moxy to become to liberals what the Nitro meme queen has become to conservatives. She's about the same age as the Nitro meme queen, she's cute, she has a blog and she has nearly 10,000 Twitter followers. If she figures out what to do with memes that make conservatives' heads explode, I think she can. 

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Higginbotham At Large does not read or publish pseudonymous or anonymous comments. When you click the "submit" button your comment is not yet published it is merely sent to me for my approval or deletion. Commenters who hide behind "handles", nicknames or other pseudonyms will not see their comments published here. If readers won't know who you are, I will delete your comment. No Ring of Gyges for you. I like email addresses that include the submitter's actual name like mine does: JosephHigginbotham@gmail.com.

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Why Every Concerned Citizen Should Blog

James Craig Brannon asked me if I have any specific plans or a lofty vision for the 24,000 member Blog Zone group I own on the Linkedin platform. James Craig Brannon, this post is for you.

From the first time our parents give us a whipping before they even hear our side of why the school principal called them to the time we thirst for the blood of brown people because a president told us to, we are taught and conditioned to obey and believe authority figures and to never doubt them.

We are taught to honor our father and our mother but we are not told what to do if our father rapes us or our mother sells us to boyfriends in exchange for drugs.

We are taught that network TV reporters wouldn’t be paid $millions if they weren’t telling us the truth.

We are taught that if there were anything dangerous in those big tanks on the river bank that the owners of those tanks wouldn’t have put them that close to the water intake and the state would have inspected those tanks and their contents frequently.

We are taught that a big publicly-traded company like Monsanto wouldn’t risk its treasure, its stock price, its reputation and its employee’s health by polluting a town with dioxin and that, even if they did, those Monsanto paychecks make it worth the risk.

Pre-internet, if a citizen awakened from The Matrix to discover that he was but a power source for the very machinery that keeps him enslaved and deluded in a soup of delusion and blissful ignorance, he couldn’t broadcast the truth unless he found somebody with a printing press and a newsroom or a transmitter who is able to see the tubing and risk his career and maybe his life helping others to see the tubing.

But in the internet age, anyone capable of questioning authority and acknowledging the truth can disconnect their neighbors from The Matrix.

In yesterday’s blog post, J.Craig Brannon, I told you the true story of how a blogger prevented a powerful state bureaucrat from unilaterally and secretly creating laws.

Just as somebody knew that a bureaucrat tried to be a one-man legislature, somebody knew what Monsanto and Freedom Industries were doing to The Kanawha Valley. Somebody knows when reporters and presidents lie to us. Somebody knows when parents don’t deserve honor or children and that no God worthy of worship would say otherwise.

What if those somebodies blogged, emailed, tweeted and disseminated by all available means what they know? The powerful abusers of their authority fear this – which is why we should do it.

Many of the 24,000 bloggers in The Blog Zone group want nothing more than to sell cookies or SEO services or cosmetics. That’s OK, but I hope some of them will question authority and, perhaps, find out what’s in those big tanks on the river where our drinking water comes from and then blog about it.

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Higginbotham At Large does not read or publish pseudonymous or anonymous comments. When you click the "submit" button your comment is not yet published it is merely sent to me for my approval or deletion. Commenters who hide behind "handles", nicknames or other pseudonyms will not see their comments published here. If readers won't know who you are, I will delete your comment. No Ring of Gyges for you. I like email addresses that include the submitter's actual name like mine does: JosephHigginbotham@gmail.com.

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How A Blog Post Did What TV, Newspapers And Communications Professionals Failed To Do

In November 2014 Acting Director of the West Virginia Division of Labor, John Junkins, sent "emergency" wage and hour rules to Secretary of State Natalie Tennant. These rules, had they become law, would have required employers to compensate employees for all manner of things that are not compensable under current law.

Almost nobody in Old Media reported it. Many of them didn't know about these proposed emergency rules until they heard about it from me via email.

So-called “communication directors” at business organizations didn’t send media releases to the Old Media.

So how did I learn about the proposed “emergency” wage and hour changes? I read about the emergency rules on a blog. 

As a liberal, I actually liked some of the emergency rules but I didn't like how the Division of Labor tried to sneak them into law between legislative sessions. Had it not been for the blogger and the resultant last-minute tsunami of angry letters to Gov. Tomblin generated by that blogger, these emergency wage and hour laws would have been enacted automatically without any action at all from the legislature. 

The blog that roused employers to write angry letters to the governor was Steptoe-Johnson law firm's "Employment Essentials" blog. Lawyer Rodney Bean wrote the post that reported what Old Media largely failed to report. Employers killed the proposed emergency rules by sending the link to Bean's post out to other employers via Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and old-fashioned email and asking them to write to the governor and explain why these emergency rules would be bad for business. 

When I started emailing Charleston newspaper reporters and TV stations to ask them why they weren't reporting on the "emergency" wage and hour rules proposed by John Junkins, some of them told me they knew about it but hadn't reported it but most told me this was the first they'd heard of it and asked me to send them the blog link. 

Most of them never reported on the proposed wage and hour law small business owners were Tweeting and emailing the blog link to their friends who, in turn, wrote letters to the governor and sent the blog link to their friends who also wrote letters to the governor.

This is the power of blogging. You don't need an FCC license, a printing press or a TV transmitter to stop a bureaucrat from sneaking new laws onto the books between legislative sessions. 

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Higginbotham At Large is not affiliated with the Steptoe-Johnson  law firm and has not been paid for mentioning the "Employment Essentials" blog or attorney Rodney Bean.. 

Higginbotham At Large does not read or publish pseudonymous or anonymous comments. When you click the "submit" button your comment is not yet published it is merely sent to me for my approval or deletion. Commenters who hide behind "handles", nicknames or other pseudonyms will not see their comments published here. If readers won't know who you are, I will delete your comment. No Ring of Gyges for you. I like email addresses that include the submitter's actual name like mine does: JosephHigginbotham@gmail.com.

West Virginia, Saint Albans, St. Albans, Dunbar, Charleston, Kanawha, Speaker bureau, speakers bureau, speaker's bureau, speakers' bureau, guest speaker, 25177, 25143, 25303, 25309, 25301, 25302, 25305, 25311, 25314, 25304, neighborhood watch, animal rights, animal welfare, no-kill, shelters, crime watch, neighborhood crime watch, ward 4,vegan, vegetarian, liberal, liberalism, progressive, branding, naming, home rule, dog tethering,  Peoples Party, portmanteaus, ghost writer, ghostwriter, ghostwriting, ghost writing, neologisms, neologism, brand names, brand name, dog racing, Grey2K, Carey Thiel, Phil Kabler, Rob Casto