Although it may appear that celebrities get hoards of “instant” followers whenever the sign up for services like Twitter, the phenomenon is a byproduct of hard work done long BEFORE they opened that new channel. Celebrities spend their entire careers building a fan base, and they know that those fans will “follow” them wherever they go. This post takes a look at some of the things that companies can learn from those who are experimenting with a new way to interact with their fans.
The first part of any New/Social Media strategy is to create compelling content that draws an audience–an effort that takes time. Celebrities like Oprah, Ellen, or Shaq, don’t have this lead-time problem. Since they can mobilize their existing fan base quickly, they can skip over the “building an audience” phase and go straight to the “interacting with the audience” phase.
A couple months ago, your New Media Evangelist described how Shaquille O’Neil interacts with his audience through Random Acts of Shaqness. Recently, I witnessed another one.
On May 27th, my Tweetdeck/Twitscoop window displayed two words looming large: “Kirstie” and “Alley.” At first I feared that something terrible had happened to the actress who I’d come to know as a neurotic barkeep on the television show Cheers. Thankfully, however, instead of reading of her untimely demise, I found that @kirstiealley was in the middle of a Twitter experiment with her then 28,838 followers.
CONTEST:$300 PRIZE. FILL IN THE BLANK. A “DAY IN THE LIFE SHOW” OF KIRSTIE ALLEY..SHOULD BE CALLED————— GOOOO!!!!
At 9:50 a.m., exactly 53 minutes after posting the challenge, she announced the winning entry:
@Boomstone AND THE WINNER IS….”DON’T CALL ME KRISTIE” YAYYYYYYYYYYYY tough call (a few versions of this so went verbatum) yayyyyyyy
- $300 per new show title?
- 15 cents per entry?
- 37.7 entries per minute?
So, what are you asking of your audience?
Kistie Alley Shaq Oprah Ellen Twitscoop audience chris brogan ron ploof
