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
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.