CNN: Stephendann.com

The Celebrity-Twitter Business Model

: Image via CrunchBase

The Celebrity Business model has to be a near perfect fit for twitter.

Celebrities are a broadcast model who are used to acquiring, seeking and maintaining attention
Celebrities have uneven following/follower ratios in real life (people they know versus people who know about them)
Celebrities are used to be reduced to soundbytes (quotable film moments, red carpet interview, press releases)
Celebrities are used to having to make short statements that are linked to larger work elsewhere. In fact, some celebrities turn into the human TinyURL for causes, films or character portrayals.

In short, celebrity suits Twitter because they’re using very similar message structures, business strategies (relevance versus frequency versus overexposure) and when the professional face to face social networkers meet the social networking technology with the best fit for their existing model – well, it’s a perfect storm.

The downside for the social media industry (and the social media marketers) is the sudden rise in competition from the professional social networker circuit. It’s one thing to proclaim great advice on how to be a social media guru (oh how I loath that term) when you’ve got a four or five figure follower count – until Ashton Kutcher makes a mockery of you with the seven figure follower profile. That’s even before Oprah tries out the technology and completely reshapes the top end of the playing field (of course, I noticed a volume of “I was here before Oprah” that was strangely louder than the “I was here before Kutcher“. Kutcher’s the one who had a race to a million users with CNN.)

Still, it’s been fun, and my Twitter circle is still as valuable the day after Oprah as it was the day before. Maybe because I don’t mind that celebrities have phones, eat food, use the internet and do other mundane things that I do – like play with new technologies on the internet.

I for one welcome our new early majority overlords

A few weeks ago, I was speaking at BarCamp Canberra. I mentioned that the early adopter/innovator phase of the internet was on the way out, and the next way of early majority was inbound.

Ashton Kutcher might just be the pinnacle point of the early adopters who usher in the massive wave (34% of a market, compared to innovator 2.5 and early adopter 16%). With the arrival of the Million Twitter Follower Contest, CNN and A2K’s measuring contest (get a ruler and a room people), and the impending @Oprah possibilities (which strike me as the potential for unmitigated levels of direct awesome in this space), we’re over the obscurity hill and into new territory.

Part of this new territory is the TwitterListener who picks up an account to follow others without having any real desire to post anything themselves – if Twitter wants to produce a monetized area, they should look into an paid placement / advertising sponsored Twitter Reader Client (iPhone, PC, Mac) that just draws the streams of content with offering any capacity to reply or post beyond an autoretweet/share function. There’s a new generation of twitter users who want to follow, to listen and to observe without participation. Time to accommodate their needs alongside our own early adopter broadcast models.

Of course, the amusing thing in this entire proceeding was that I distinctly recall a cohort of geek early adopters (A) bemoaning that nobody knew about Twitter. Right now, I’m amused to see a number of geek early adopters (B) bemoaning that too many people know about Twitter (Note: A and B have overlap in C, but A != C and B != C)

The only thing worse than being tweeted about is not being tweeted about at all

The other consideration with Ashton Kutcher, Oprah and famous rich people showing up on Twitter is that people who have cash, and enjoyment of Twitter are around when the technology sector angel investors start to dry up. This could be a really useful thing for a company like Twitter to have some deep pocket users if the well starts to run dry.