Re# (ReHash) - Rehashing old great posts on Twitter

The real-time nature of Twitter, blogs, and social media in general is fascinating, and much has been written about how this real-time nature changes how we discover and consume information. Interestingly, however, this real-time nature has a unintended side effect in that anything older than a few days is deemed to be “old news” and can’t be discussed.

Many of the topics we wrestle with however, as B2B marketing professionals, are less transient than this. Frameworks for thinking about problems, key questions to ask providers, case studies, and best practices to implement are all relevant over a much longer timeframe – quarters or even years. The interesting challenge with blogging is that it is oriented to be a real-time discipline where a recent post buries a past post. This metaphor works well for current events and other time-sensitive discussions, but not so well for conveying the deep content that is of relevance for an audience in a specialty field.

Unless they do deep searches, or dig for specific information, this real-time nature of social media, blogging, and Twitter results in an interested audience not being able to easily discover potentially very valuable information just by the fact that it was not written in the past week.

Why am I writing this? Because I’m interested in performing an experiment. I’m going to restart the conversation (via Twitter) around a few old posts that I feel are still timely, interesting, and relevant today. Each one will be quite old, many of them from the earlier days of this blog when it was virtually unknown, and of a topic that I would gladly write about again today. I’m interested to see the reaction to the posts, and whether these posts have the same effect and pickup in the market that I would expect for a brand new post.

Any tweets about these posts will be tagged with Re# (ReHash) so there’s no mistaking the fact that they have been brought back to life from times past.

What are your thoughts? Is this experiment going to work? Or is it as bad of an idea as the Auto-DM?

Is there a reason that the real-time nature of the discussions on Twitter should be left to solely real-time conversations? What have you found with social media and content timeliness? Is it the content itself, or the medium it’s discussed in that determines whether the content is still relevant? I would love to hear everyone's perspectives on this - and I'll report back the outcomes of the experiments.