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Attention Twilight fans – tune in or set your Tivos! “Twilight” series author, Stephenie Meyer, will be joining Oprah live Friday the 13th, for her one and ONLY interview before the premiere of “New Moon.” Oprah will chat with Stephenie about her success and give viewers an exclusive look at “New Moon” which opens in theaters on November 20th.
Do you have a question for Stephenie? Are you her biggest fan? Then be sure to go here.
There’s even a Facebook event page for it!
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by Michelle Lentz
Everybody has growing pains.
Nielsen is reporting that while Twitter is growing, it is also suffering in the retention category. Where’s the user loyalty?
A couple of weeks ago, I speculated about the Oprah effect – that thousands would join and those accounts would then lie dormant after a month. It seems I’m not that far off on how users react to Twitter in general. According to Nielsen,
Currently, more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.
When I teach Twitter (and for that matter, all social media), I stress that you get out of it what you put into it. What Twitter does poorly is demonstrate how to effectively use the tool. From the question (What are you doing?) to the interaction, it is just not always clear to a Twitter – and Internet – newbie.
I’ve long thought that Twitter should change their question. What are you doing? is not the question people are answering. They’re letting you know where they are, what is new, what is interesting, and where they need help or are offering help. The very question confuses people and causes skeptics to call Twitter silly because they don’t want to know when someone is refilling a coffee pot.
The problem with Twitter is that you have to use it to truly understand it. You can’t just lurk and read other people’s tweets coming in on your feed. You need to participate. Twitter actually loses some value if you don’t join the conversation. Of course, how to join the conversation is also a problem. Even if you find people to follow, how will they know you are talking to them? I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time explaining D (not DM) and @ to people who are new to Twitter. After all, it’s hard to contribute if no one can hear you talk.
So, my advice to all those Oprah, Ashton, and Ellen followers – find someone else to follow. Search on your favorite topics, see who is chatting about them, and follow those folks. Follow many folks. Then join the conversation. Don’t just sit back and read – contribute. Use the @ symbol and get to it. Again, you get out of Twitter what you put into it. Joining any social network isn’t going to expand your horizons or even just brighten your day if you don’t participate.
In this case, the onus is on both the new users to participate as well as Twitter, who needs to make things clearer and easier. They’re moving past just early adopters using the system. It’s time to release some tutorials and some demos so that Twitter really can be mainstream – and keep those new users who followed Oprah.
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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Sites: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net
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Following the solo media vs. traditional media race that led Twitter into both relevance and irrelevance, the result is that the carefully guarded community and its unique culture are now permanently altered – for better or for worse.
According to estimates sourced by Engadget Editor-in-Chief Ryan Block, Twitter grew by 1.2 million users simply as a result of the “Oprah-effect.”
TechCrunch’s MG Siegler also explored the process for estimating Twitter’s path into the mainstream.
1.2 million
So, how many new users really joined Twitter as a result of the celebrity-fueled popularity contest?
I’m not sure the answer truly matters. If we explore it from a sociological perspective, I believe that the culture of Twitter has been introduced to a significant event that may indeed shift interaction and behavior overall.
Going into the race, estimates pegged the active userbase anywhere between 5 – 8 million. Now post race and the Oprah-effect, over 1 million people were introduced to the service guided by a “follow me” mentality. This “overnight” expansion represents a potential 10-12% saturation ratio. These new users will participate and build communities around them based on their interpretation of the network as framed by those whom they follow. Remember, we are measured by our last 20 tweets or updates within each social network. Take a look for yourself, www.twitter.com/insertusername
It is what it is. The real question is, what do you want to get out of these connections?
In the end, we are still responsible for creating our own experience within the community and that is one of the true advantages and rewards of Twitter. We foster and cultivate individual ecosystems that bind us contextually.
Competing for Attention
Perhaps what is most interesting and prevalent is the behavior transformation in content consumption that is taking place in “Twitter time” and it’s establishing a new world authority. For many of us, we’re migrating away from destinations and potentially RSS readers as well as our primary source of news, relevant information, pleasant distractions, and trending topics. We’re quickly focusing on Twitter, Facebook News Feeds, FriendFeed and the statusphere as our highly curated and personalized attention dashboards.
As content publishers, producers, and creators, we need to acknowledge, understand, and embrace this critical disruption.
Let’s take a look at Twitter as an example. Before the April’s madness of follower contests, Comscore reported that Twitter had experienced a new record of 9.3 million visitors in March, which represented a 131% jump.
As you can see, the growth curve is practically vertical. And, we’re sure to see yet another surge in growth when April numbers are released.
However, Comscore is also observing what I believe to represent the hope and potential future for traditional media.
When they examined the percentage of visitors to Twitter who also visited the top online news brands and compared it to that of the total U.S. Internet audience, they discovered a strong level of overlap. The result is that the average Twitter user was often 2 and 3 times as likely to visit the top online news brands as the average person. For example, while 17 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience visited CNN.com in March, more than double that percentage (38 percent) of Twitter users did so.
Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and active online social interaction breathe new, and measurable, life into great content where it’s hosted, simply by connecting it to the potentially attentive people where and how they are currently engaged.
This is the Statusphere, a new ecosystem for sharing, discovering, and publishing updates and micro-sized content that reverberates throughout social networks and syndicated profiles, resulting in a formidable network effect of viral activity. It is the digital curation of relevant content that binds us contextually and through the statusphere we can connect directly to existing contacts, reach new people, and also forge new friendships through the friends of friends effect (FoFs) in the process.
In order to compete for prominence in the future, we must first compete for attention where and when it’s captivated. While we contribute to the evolution of new media and the supporting cultures within each network, we are responsible for what we contribute and what we gain from the interaction. We earn the relationships we deserve.
Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, or Facebook
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There are really two questions here: Will Oprah make tweeting so amazingly uncool that our parents will be doing it? And, can Twitter handle an Oprah effect?
Yesterday, Oprah announced on her Facebook page that she’ll be sending her “very first tweet” today when she hosts Ashton Kutcher, who won his recent (and silly) race against CNN to have 1 million followers.
Ashton, who does love Twitter, will no doubt evangelize the product. But I am still cringing just a little.
A few weeks ago, Ellen deGeneres issued a challenge to her watchers to help her get to some crazy number of followers. And I got a phone call.
Apparently if you Google “Twitter write tech support” you get one of my tweets, from my blog. So a woman in Evansville, Indiana, was able to follow a trail from my blog to my contact information on my business web site and call me. And because I felt sorry for her, I spent the next hour trying to walk her through how to set up a Twitter account. It was the equivalent of a “CD-ROM drive is not a cupholder” conversation. Since I wasn’t exactly billing out at my normal rate, I cut the call off as best I could after an hour.
My point is that this is a non-technical woman who wanted to join Twitter just to help out her favorite daytime talk show host. What’s going to happen when Oprah gets people to sign up? I’d love to hear the stats about the number of people who sign up today -v- the number of abandoned Twitter accounts in one month. Since Twitter uses Get Satisfaction, I can’t exactly say that Twitter Tech Support is user-friendly for someone like my dad – or my caller from Evansville.
That said, the Ellen/Oprah effect is cool in a way. I often preach that Twitter flattens the org chart. This is people trying to connect with celebrity.
But here’s the next question. Oprah can have an amazing effect on things. If she’s twittering, and if large number of users are driven to the site to follow her, then can Twitter handle it? Or will we be seeing the fail whale today?
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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Sites: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net
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