BADWEEK

Don't know if you saw this, as news items go, this should not have even come up on the radar, but Twitter recently changed their Favorite button to a Heart button.

Like I said, hardly newsworthy, unless of course you're the editor of ADWEEK, the advertising industry's leading trade publication. Then, it's not only front page material it demands some hard-nose, in-field journalism.

Adweek dispatched TWO hungry reporters to interview eight, count em, EIGHT Digital Gurus to weigh in on the paradigm-shifting, game-changing matter before the frustrated journalists at Ad Age could even get another blank cassette in the recorder.

I'm sure there was some Monday morning quarterbacking going on after that journalistic debacle.

"How did we let Adweek get the scoop on us?"

"First they beat us to the SuperDesk™ story and now this?"

"People, we need to roll up our sleeves and get in the trenches. How are we doing on that list of the Hottest 25 Chief Creative Officers Under 25 Years Old?"

But enough imaginary competitive squabbling, what, you are probably wondering, did these EIGHT Digital Gurus have to say on the ground-shaking re-arrangement of pixels found at the bottom of every 140 character tweet? Not surprisingly, there was a wealth of wisdom spewing from these experts oozing with professional expertise.

Said one prognosticator:

"This will add more meaningful and emotional actions for marketers to measure content performance and to base targeting and optimization of paid media on."

God, yes. He used the words 'content', 'base targeting' and 'optimization' in one sentence. Not sure what any of that means but last week when I favorited a tweet from Hellman's Mayonnaise, I had a meaningful emotional action and was almost in tears.

This expert was not alone.

"Twitter can be a lonely place for users when you tweet something and no one gives you a response or feedback -- this will help."

I certainly hope so. I once tweeted about Kim Jung Un, the North Korean Child King and no one Hearted it. I got very despondent and had to call my wife. Also, to ask her to pick my shirts at the dry cleaners.

The EIGHT interviews also produced this nugget of sagacity, which if you read carefully and spot the indecisiveness, is actually two nuggets of sagacity.

"Brands will likely get more 'likes' than they did 'favorites' because liking something is a much lower barrier than making it your 'favorite,' especially when it comes to retweeting. However, this move by Twitter could create less retweets, which generates more reach for a brand. On the plus side, it may help with standardizing reporting across Facebook and Twitter as it will be a 'like' for 'like.' "

If I've said that once I've said it a hundred times.

The crack trade reporters could have investigated the recent salary and bonus freeze at Publicis and correlated that to the $50 million spent on the bungled Omnicom/Publicis merger, but they went a different direction.

Nice job Adweek, nice job.