So this is a time sensitive topic, and I’m already a day late, so this quick stream of consciousness will probably not be very well thought out and hence cause people to vehemently comment about how wrong I am. Oh well.
So Oprah has joined the Twittierverse with the appropriately chosen moniker @oprah. She was basically dragged kicking and screaming into it by Ashton Kutcher on his race with CNN to One Million followers. (BTW, different topic, but you will never hear me say anything negative about Ashton Kutcher. He is very high on my list of business minded entertainers that I hope to meet someday, not for the star power or Hollywood “glow,” but for the business and marketing insights I could learn.)
Now the social media world has fallen into a few camps on this.
– Predictably, there is the camp who feels like their baby is being exploited now that Oprah has gotten involved. These are the same type of people who listened to Pearl Jam at a dive bar in downtown Seattle in 1990 and then got mad when they showed up on David Letterman and sold out Madison Square Garden.
– There’s a camp who thinks Oprah is late to Social Media, and shouldn’t be given any credit at all.
– There’s a group of people who have never heard of Twitter who are about to sign up for accounts just so they can follow Oprah.
– And finally, there’s a bunch of people in mainstream media who are going to be calling the “Social Media Expert” in their city to do a 90 second interview on this “blossoming company called Twitter.”
So here’s my synthesis:
Oprah never has and never will need Social Media. She has the most popular syndicated television program in the history of mankind. Combine all the impressions from the top 100 “social media superstars,” and I bet that number doesn’t even sniff the kind of eyeballs Oprah generates in TV and print. And let’s not even begin to joke about revenue. Take Harpo’s annual revenue in one hand. Start counting up all the revenue generated by Social Media Superstars in the other. And let me know when you get to an even balance.
I work in Social Media, so this may seem like blasphemy, but honestly, Social Media is what you do when you can”t get on Oprah. If I build the world’s first economical and reliable jet pack, and post videos on YouTube of me flying back and forth to work all day, guys like Michael Arrington and Guy Kawaskai are going to cover it. But if I get on Oprah, or even 60 Minutes, I better have an army of telephone operators ready to take orders. It’s a subtle but distinct difference.
Said more succinctly, Social Media is what we do to get NOTICED by Oprah’s producers. It’s not what Oprah needs to do to get noticed by us.
That being said, Oprah, as a teacher and educator, please use proper capitalization on your Twitter page. There’s no reason to join the Twitterverse and then show 50 million kids that the only reason to ever use the “Shift” key on their laptop is to create a smiley face.
So Oprah, welcome to our world here in Social Media-ville. This is what has been created by all of us with lots to say, but nowhere to previously say it. So come hang out for a while, and then remember us fondly when you are in front of your camera, in your studio, talking to 200 million people.
