New Twitter CEO's First Email
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With much-needed advertising experience, Linda Yaccarino joined Twitter and wrote her first email to staff, a good one for students to analyze. In addition to the email, below, Yaccarino posted her message in a Twitter thread.
Here are a few notes about the email:
Twitter employees are the primary audience. Secondary audiences might be Twitter users, the media, investors, and the public. As you’ll see, Elon Musk is significant too.
Yaccarino started on June 5, so it took a while for her first email. One meme shows a skeleton waiting for her second email.
She starts with a question designed to engage her readers. Then she compliments Elon Musk, her boss and a quite a force. For her first message, acknowledging him is probably important, although I found myself skimming this part. The next paragraph gushes on—in italics. Clearly, Yaccarino is speaking to Musk fans and free speech advocates with that last bit.
I’m wanting to know more about her: who is Linda Vaccarino? After her opening question, I expected something more personal, maybe about her background or her experience as a Twitter user.
The “global town square” refers to Musk’s goal for Twitter. After a quick mention, Yaccarino defines it after “Enter Twitter 2.0,” which, I guess, is a heading along with “The success . . .” That section loosely shifts to employees.
Her tone is enthusiastic, as we would expect. Morale has been low, with mass layoffs, harsh communication, and falling ad revenue.
As we see too often, her use of “literally” is colloquial and not quite right.
She uses a couple of rhetorical devices that I find: “wrapping your arms” and “heels” (the latter, a defined metaphor) and an attempt at alliteration: “person, partner, and creator on the planet.” We could call the “global town square” an allusion.
I’m not a fan of what I call random font enhancements: bold and italics in the middle of paragraphs or at the ends of sentences. Could she use better organization to emphasize key points?
I wonder how employees responded. Are they motivated? I’m not sure what anyone would do differently after reading the email? What was the purpose?
Building Twitter 2.0 Together
Hello Twitter!
People keep asking me: Why Twitter? So, I’ll tell you.
From space exploration to electric vehicles, Elon knew these industries needed transformation, so he did it. More recently it has become increasingly clear that the global town square needs transformation—to drive civilization forward through the unfiltered exchange of information and open dialogue about the things that matter most to us.
Have you ever been talking with someone particularly insightful and thought, You’re brilliant—everybody should get the chance to hear this. Or, I’m learning so much from you—can we do this again? Or maybe it’s as simple as, You should have the freedom to speak your mind. We all should.
Enter Twitter 2.0.
Twitter is on a mission to become the world’s most accurate real-time information source and a global town square for communication. We’re on the precipice of making history—and that’s not an empty promise. That’s OUR reality.
When you start by wrapping your arms around this powerful vision, literally everything is possible. You have to genuinely believe—and work hard for that belief. And in this moment of complete reinvention, we have the opportunity to reach across aisles, create new partnerships, celebrate new voices, and build something together that can change the world. And from what I can tell so far, you’re built for this.
The success of Twitter 2.0 is all of our responsibility.
We need to think big.
We need to transform.
We need to do it all together.
And we can do it all by starting from first principles – questioning our assumptions and building something new from the ground up. It’s rare to have the chance to put a new future into the hands of every person, partner, and creator on the planet.
That’s exactly why I’m here – with all of YOU.
So, let’s dig our heels in (4 inches or flat!) and build Twitter 2.0 together.
Linda
