Oprah and Twitter: Best understatement, ever
By Karen Holt
Hyperventilating stories and blog posts are trumpeting the (super, super exciting!) news that Oprah is now on Twitter.
After just a day or so, she is up to at least 263,917 followers, well on her way to equaling President Obama’s 738,208.
But one spoilsport (old media, wouldn’t you know it?) included this caution from marketing strategist Andrew Davis:
“The mega-celebrity marketing machine that is Oprah seems like the next level of adoption.”
After the quote, the New York Times goes on:
Mr. Davis said the service was overflowing with messages, known as tweets, making it hard to filter out the important ones…“People can no longer digest the content,” Mr. Davis said. “You start to think, what am I really getting out of this service?”
Hard to filter out the important Tweets? Yes, I can sort of see how that could happen.
Check out how authors and book marketers are using Twitter—quick, before Oprah ruins everything.
Related: Three items from PCMagazine Online: These crazy celebrities don’t get Twitter, their new followers don’t get Twitter, and together, they are bound to ruin it and And the Mighty Oprah’s First Tweet Is… and Oprah Hits Twitter, Earth Continues to Spin. Also see Google and Techmeme roundups.
April 18th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Albert Einstein once received a letter from a 10-year-old girl in fourth grade, who told him what she had not told anyone else before: that she was having trouble with fractions. Einstein wrote back: “My dear child, I want to assure you that my mathematical difficulties are far greater than yours.”
According to Nick Bilton of The New York Times, Oprah is getting “more than 1,000 responses a minute.”
Oprah’s problems with information overload are far greater than mine. Maybe one day she will give us some hints about how to filter the important messages: how to separate the tweet from the chaff.
Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks
April 18th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
@ Michael - I’m thinking Oprah has a staff she pays to not only read her incoming tweets (and tell her of anything important), but most likely send the outgoing as well.
Honestly, I hope I never hear the word Twitter on television again. How is it news is what I’d like to know. It’s news because they’re talking about it, the media are inventing the news themselves. Is there so little of importance going on in the world?
April 19th, 2009 at 8:33 am
It’s official twitter is no longer cool so watch the exodus from the service to some new and all but similar service untill noone can keeps track and it’s all reduced back to simplified RSS residing on different server again.
This is what happened to Email, webpages and blogs and it will happen to twitter once things grow it stops being a community and start being a infrastructure servive and those cant be maintained as a gated community for long.
April 19th, 2009 at 8:42 am
Twitter is an opt-in system so there’s really no reason why you can’t filter out the messages you want, just ONLY follow people you’re interested in, that way you’ll minimize noise.
Oprah may get a lot of replies but her timeline only has the tweets of a few people, so the experience she has is infinitely different from that of those who follow thousands..