Celebrities Who Treat Twitter Like Broadcasting Medium Miss the Point
I form first impressions very fast, and since I make a lot of friends through Twitter I’ve figured out some different ways of evaluating their profile to make some generalizations about who they talk to, how engaged they are with people, and what they’re interested in. It’s much faster to read someone’s last 100 tweets than to read their last 10 blog posts. One thing I look at is the ratio of followers to following. The reason is that I’ve discovered there is a balance between the two – if someone is following too many people (far more than are following them) then they are likely a spammer. Twitter controls for this by making it so that you can’t follow more than 2000 people until you have at least 1800 people following you. On the other end of the spectrum are those who are followed by many many people but make themselves seem inaccessible by following back only a tiny percentage.
What this says to me is, “I’m not listening to you – I’m listening to tweets that come up with my name in them”. Bleagh.
Yesterday, I gave a talk with An Bui to a group of business women about how they can use Twitter to benefit themselves and their businesses. At one point, a hand was raised and the person said “a lightbulb just went off for me – this is a way for me to broadcast what my company is doing”. Damn! This is the danger with Twitter, if you look at it as an outside observer its easy to see why people think this – but broadcasting is truly a small percentage of what you need to do to realize the real benefits of Twitter.
What real benefits, let me list the ones I’ve seen:
- rapid information sharing where friends are the filter through which you hear about the world
- ability to discover people with similar niche interests and find places to expand those interests
- random meetings of people you read, admire, compete with, etc. in cities while travelling
- chance to come up with cool content creation partnerships (blog posts, talks, video, etc.) on the fly with other creatives
- sense of being more intimately connected to friends, even when you’re a workaholic (and proud of it!) like me
- way to discover products/services friends LOVE that are improving their quality of life (yeah – I do listen to my friends for this stuff)
- hear a random thing and search it on Twitter to find out what it is related to… long tail searches of conversation work
- find out what people are saying about you, your content, brand, customers, competitors, ANYTHING!
- feel like you’re much closer to the people you admire (internet personalities, celebrities) and be the first to hear about their work
There’s probably more, but I’m dashing this off fast and found I couldn’t type fast enough to write these benefits down.
Someone Tell Them: It’s the Conversation that Counts
Why? Because even for big time celebrities they are still real people, who can endear themselves to new fans, find new opportunities, share in the richness of the world, provide a useful filter to their followers, and be more deeply connected. Also, celebri-twits are battling against a deeply entrenched early-adopter culture that is both excited and horrified by the way these newest converts are using Twitter. On one hand, I can admire that they are even better at shameless self-promotion than what I’ve seen so far — but I’m disappointed because I expected this new media to peel back another layer of the onion and make these people more accessible. Wasn’t that what all the hype was fundamentally about?
Would I be excited if one of these celebrities followed me? Yes, I admit I would be briefly. Would I be converted? No, not unless they took the time to read something I said and respond with something relevant. To join the small conversation that is my life. That’s how I can be reached, touched, and impressed.
Hell, even internet-famous Julia Allison (or one of her assistants) emailed me when I commented that I continued to read Valleywag due to “my love/hate relationship with Julia Allison” and asked me why the hate. I was impressed, she was listening – and even went to the effort to get my email address from my blog. Yeah I realize she’s not famous on the same level as these celebrities – I just thought it was thoughtful and a good example.
Celebri-Twit Yer Doin it Wron
Look, for example at some celebrit-twits who are making a splash on Twitter like Ashton Kutcher, Oprah,
Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk)
Oprah Winfrey (@oprah)
Larry King (@kingsthings)
Breaking (bwhaha!) update: sounds like Spencer (of Spencer and Hill on that MTV show “The Hills”) wants to compete with Ashton on Twitter. Even the radio commentators on KISS 106.1 FM were like… “oh god, have’t we heard enough of this yet?” Yeah, bleagh. I bet I’ll blog it, for some reason I just can’t stay away from this topic, disgruntled semi-early adopter that I am.
Crowdspring has a sense of humor!
I just signed up for Crowdspring and look what they gave me:
What is Crowdspring
A place where creatives can sell their work for spec and buyers can submit a creative brief and quickly get a whole bunch of submissions to choose from.
Social Media Begins with Listening, Not Branding
Warning: bit of a rant.
I just opened my weekly email from Biznik, letting me know about business events in my neck of the woods, and was confronted with this:
What’s the problem with this? Well, for one the use of “Any social media expert” kind of baffles me — since they are few and far between. By I digress. The problem with this approach is that it puts branding and SEO at the fore and in focus, completely confusing how people need to come into social media if they want to be engaging, successful, learn, and teach. I hate to use the dreaded buzzword, but “authenticity” comes from doing a whole lot of listening and conversing first – and THEN figuring out how your brand, SEO strategy, etc. fit with social media.
I’m not saying this because I’m some social media bleeding heart who thinks it’s more about the conversation than the bottom line – yes using social media is a business activity and fundamentally about making money. However, you are never going to sell me something if you turn me off like the myriad “social media experts” who follow me on Twitter each day masked as PR professionals, real estate agents, mortgage brokers or (worst!) motivational speakers and coaches. The insincerity of it all makes me sick.
I don’t know Steve MacDonald, and I imagine for those who are new to social media they will come out of this session with some things to do and will learn quickly from the community (if they are open) if their approach is too much talking and not enough listening. This makes me think even more about how to make sure we have the right focus at my talk next weekend, alongside An Bui, where we will address women in business and teach them about Twitter.
I’ve got a flight back to Seattle, so we’ll leave this to be continued… check back later this week as I work on developing the talk and look for your input. Maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll see you there!
Is this “Neophilia”, or what?
Last night I stopped by the Valleywag mixer, which was geared towards PR and Media types, at Apartment 24. I was curious to meet Owen Thomas, and understand what he was trying to accomplish by bringing together flaks for a no-host bar (heh). If you don’t know, Valleywag is the Silicon Valley tech gossip rag that everyone claims to hate but reads anyway. Recently merged with Gawker Media, it takes a decidedly “New York attitude” towards gossip, publishing juicy tidbits that you might expect to find on Page Six. The publication is both a boon and a nightmare to PR professionals.
Trending Toward Neophilia?
Owen talked for about 20 minutes about what he observes as an emerging trend toward “neophilia” – an obsession with what is new and uses the real-time communication service Twitter as his most prominent example, speculating as to why the service should be valued so highly and could potentially be a sexy acquisition target for big companies like Google or AOL. In a surprisingly serious post this afternoon, Owen goes on record with these thoughts on Valleywag and I can’t help but think, “is this supposed trend anything really new”. Ha! I must be a Neophile, too.
Self-help gurus like to talk about living in the moment. But if we are constantly documenting the moment in which we live, we stop being able to live in it. Sometimes the most important things happened hours ago, years ago, a century ago — but we are just beginning to understand how they mattered. Realtime? So 10 minutes ago.
There is Value in Capturing the Moment
After spending nearly two years explaining to people why they should capture their lives in real-time with Whrrl, the location based collaborative storytelling application I worked on before, I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. In my mind I picture the scene from American Beauty where they are watching the plastic bag floating through the air to some simple and moving music.
“Do you want to see the most beautiful things I’ve ever felt. It’s one of those days, where it’s a minute away from snowing and there’s this electricity in the air and you can almost here it, right? And this bag was just, dancing with me like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes.
That’s the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know that there was no reason to be afraid… ever. Video is a poor excuse, I know, but it helps me remember. I need to remember.
Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it and my heart is just going to cave in.”
Impressive Twitter.com Traffic in March
I was screwing around on Compete.com tonight, looking at the traffic of some of my favorite websites, and thought “oh yeah – I should look at Twitter”.
As those of you familiar with Twitter know, there are TONS of ways to update the 140 character communication service without actually visiting the site. From desktop applications like TweetDeck to mobile phone applications, to SMS, etc. you can keep your friends and followers apprised of what has your attention now (or “what are you doing?” if you’re more traditional).
As Jeff Segal, over at breakingviews.com wrote (in an article that ended up on Fortune!), “8 million users can’t be wrong. If only it made some money”. Well, I’m guessing he based that 8 million number on the uniques trafficking the website in February, but the numbers for March are out now and Twitter.com has seen a 76.8% increase in traffic this past month. Cool.
Random Thought: compete.com should consider offering a nice little iframe embed – that would make my life easier and probably get them some more traffic.
So, why does this matter? Well, maybe it doesn’t – it’s a fair point that Twitter doesn’t make money yet but if you believe Jason Calcanis then advertising on the service will be worth millions in the coming years. What do you think?