@raineyday I never did find out. I was quite active on Twitter back then. On my third day I'd gotten involved in a very active discussion around another hashtag for a conference that was both IRL and livestreamed. It connected me to a lot of people, and from there who knows? I suspect it was some kind of six degrees of separation thing.

I'm so glad I followed through. I learned a lot from #UsGuys and met some good people.

@raineyday The conversation expanded from the Gap logo to other topics around marketing and social media. The sixth "#UsGuy" was a woman.

It kept growing. One morning I logged into my Twitter account (only a few months old) and found my handle in a tweet mentioning #UsGuys. I didn't work in marketing, but they were saying interesting things about Twitter and other things.

There were IRL meet-ups.

Some of my best experiences with Twitter started with a failed Gap logo.

#BadAdvertisements
2/2

@raineyday Not to bust on Gap (but yes, I will) around late 2010 they proposed a change to their logo. I don't remember what it looked like, but it was pretty terrible and was never used.

On Twitter, five marketing guys got into a long conversation about it. This was when the character limit was 140, and using five handles didn't leave much room for commentary.

So they adopted the hashtag #UsGuys...

#BadAdvertisements

1/2

@MostlyHarmless And then we evolved "emoticons," which used keyboard characters to make smiley faces and other things. Many of them were meant to be "read" sideways, such as :-) (colon, dash, right parenthesis) or ;-) which used a semicolon to make a wink.

One of my favorites was c(_) to make a coffee cup.

I liked emoticons more than emojis; they relied on creativity and imagination. I still use them sometimes.

#UsGuys

@Milaspage @Karen5Lund @Nickyhants @RababKhan @peg @jclittle @sueanne @rustiann @StephenJCaggiano @SherreeWorrell @bethgrangersays

I'd love to hear about everyone's journey, what you're working towards, and how you're doing. May I facilitate an #UsGuys videocall so we can all have a big catch-up? (Sharing not mandatory of course - only if you want to. Listening without sharing is cool too.)

2/2