As Easy As One, Two, Bree

I guess it all started with Demi and Ashton’s tweets to each other, but I was just realizing today all the celebrity couples on twitter and their tweets about and to each other. Sometimes I feel weird reading their messages, it’s a little TOO voyeuristic for me sometimes, I’m not into public PDA, but that same reason is probably why they are so interesting to follow in tandem in the first place. It got me thinking about the future of the Hollywood Power Couple. Hollywood Power Couples meet technology.

When, I started digging into it, there are a lot of celebrity Twitter power couples tweeting away to support each other. Take a look at some of the Twitter power couples I found and a few sample tweets:

Demi Moore (@mrskutcher) & Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk)

mrskutcher: Hanging with hubby and Usher in the trailer before he makes his cameo appearance on 5 killers. http://twitpic.com/5fkm8

Mariah Carey (@mariahcarey) & Nick Cannon (@nickcannon)

nickcannon: CHECK OUT THE DREAM’S “MY LOVE” VIDEO! FIRE! So far only 1 and a half Haters, I guess I did okay. My beautiful wife makes it easy!!

nickcannon: On a plane to see my WIFE!!!!

mariahcarey: In bed trying to get some sleep b4 studio tomorrow/(tonite: ) Getting in a few more cuddle moments w/my husband b4 he goes to work.: ): )

Giuliana Rancic (@giulianarancic) & Bill Rancic (@realbillrancic)

Heard my hubby @realbillrancic just held a twitter contest to win his book. i wanna do that too;) thinking of a question…stand by…

Pete Wentz (@petewentz) & Ashlee Simpson Wentz (@ashsimpsonwentz)

@ashsimpsonwentz new show looks amazing. i may be biased. but probably not because we are eachothers harshest critics. good job kitkat.

Joel Madden (@joelmadden) & Nicole Richie (@nicolerichie)

nicolerichie: ugh I woke up & got ready thinking it was 7am & it was 6am. NOW what should I do for an hour? Draw on @joelmadden s face?

joelmadden: BTW why did i wake up today with balls drawn on my face? @nicolerichie ???

There are more, like Heidi and Spencer (although I’m not sure if that counts as a power couple), but you get the idea.

Do you have any favorites I missed?

Logged on to Twitter and saw this funny new trend: #unfollowdiddy

Now, I’m not sure what ignited this, but one thing you have to get used to as anybody online is that there will ALWAYS be negative and crazy feedback to whatever you are doing. That’s just life. It’s hard working with celebrities to get them to understand this. You should always be expecting it, so the question is, are you prepared for it? and what do you do?

Sometimes the answer is: Ignore it.

If your community is strong enough, the positive responses and engagement will just drown out the negative. If you bring attention to it, you are the one making it bigger than it is.

#unfollowdiddy

But, if your community isn’t strong enough in the positive, let’s just say for the sake of argument that Diddy’s isn’t, how do you deal with it? It depends, but here are a few ideas:

Engage Your Top Members, The Influencers. OK, so your community isn’t strong enough on it’s own to let the positive drown out the negative, but that doesn’t mean you don’t still have a few influencers in your army somewhere. It might only be one or two, but you can start with that. Engage those influencers directly, get them involved about what they want to see from you and what they want to do, and get them talking to your community, not you. Any response from you right now fuels the negativity, so it has to come from someone else. Just keep a handle on your influencers to not get defensive. You have to give those influencers the power to engage your community where they can’t on their own yet. The important part is that it doesn’t come from you right now.

Any Publicity is Good Publicity. This isn’t always true, but a lot of the times it is. I say this a lot to artists who get angry about negative posts from Perez Hilton. I tell them, “trust me, you’re lucky he’s blogging about you at all because that means you are still relevant. Worry the day he doesn’t blog about you because that means you’re not even relevant enough for him to make fun of.” This may be the case now with Diddy. Maybe he should embrace it as a sign that he’s popular enough to ignite this sort of negative attention and because of all the attention, people will actually want to follow him. Personally, I would never blog this much about Diddy if it wasn’t for this, so just ride the ride and see what happens.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. People love self deprecating humor if you really embrace it. It knocks you off your own pedestal and puts you back on the viewer’s level and gets their attention again, and maybe some respect, or at least a few laughs. Address the response, in this case #unfollowdiddy, directly, head on, but not defensively, just join in! Maybe diddy creates a new account and Tweets “Hilarious! I can’t unfollow myself, so I signed up as @whatever and followed myself, just so I could unfollow myself #unfollowdiddy.” Everyone laughs, and they move on.

In the meantime, #unfollowdiddy! lol.

*Update: After talking to a few people in response to #unfollowdiddy I need to add another note to the above list, and that is pay attention to your engagement stats! Pay attention to what people are saying. However that may be, # of responses, using TwitTruth, whatever you need to do. If Diddy noticed that nobody is engaged with his tweets (translation: nobody cares) then he might have been able to preempt the #unfollowdiddy trend.

Great post from Jeremy Welt at jblogg.com entitled 7 Takeaways From The “Reaching Fans” Panel at SF Music Tech.

Some great principles that you can apply to any community.

My favorite: “Many artists think they’re connecting to their Fans but are just pushing info out. There is a difference.”

Jeremy also happens to be my long time mentor and I have learned a lot from him, so take a read.

My social media buddy and all around wonderful person, Charles Porch (you can follow him here: @charlesporch) sent me this great blog post, that wraps up nicely my Twitter engagement post: Joel Mackey of OpenPressWire.com writes “A Celebrity That Gets Social Media, I know shocking”

Joel is talking about celebrities starting to catch on to the trend to return the favor of “following” and following their subscribers back. But he goes on to write, there is still one problem after that… Engagement.

Most of these celebrity accounts still don’t get it. They don’t engage, they don’t talk to their fans, they don’t ask them questions, they don’t take polls, they don’t have contests or even acknowledge the existence of a fan. So one problem remains, while they may follow people, they still don’t communicate with them.

Joel goes on to write about the band Collective Soul who he says is doing it the right way.

What I find so simply amazing about these guys is that they actually respond to fans. They retweet fans tweets. They read blogs by users on Twitter. They make exclusive videos just for their Twitter fans.

Excellent points. Now, what I want to point out though, is that this thinking shouldn’t be exclusive to Twitter. This is a great example though of some community marketing principles.

I often run an exercise with my staff before we start a marketing campaign. I ask them, why does anyone want to be part of an artist community in the first place? Here are a few core reasons:

• Feel closer to the artist
• Get free things
• Be the first to get news
• Express themselves
• Find people with common interests
• Increase their personal status

There a lot more, but these are the main things. We’ll run through them in depth later. Now, go back and look at the things above that Collective Soul is doing. Do they feed into any of those core reasons above? Yep! And that’s exactly what Joel Mackey is picking up on.

But when you see articles like Joel’s at OpenPressWire.com, definitely pay attention to the principles behind the details because it will help you apply it to other mediums. The exercise above is  great to run through if you aren’t sure where to start engaging your community and to help you stay on track.

Read the rest of Joel Mackey’s article at OpenPressWire.com

Just a throwback to some good songs and a good movie. ABBA always brightens the day. Take a listen to the Mamma Mia! Movie soundtrack here:

There was an interesting article in last week’s Hollywood Reporter titled “For ad buyers, it’s more than ratings” (subscription necessary to view online).

The article is mainly talking about advertisers views on shows like “Lost” and “Heroes“. Both shows are not super strong in ratings relative to other prime time shows, yet advertisers really like to advertise on these shows. The article then goes on to talk about viewer engagement and Optimedia‘s new Content Power Ratings.

Content Power Ratings is a metrics system that tries to move beyond typical viewership Nielsen Ratings that we’re used to, and actually try to quantify viewer engagement. To do this they look at three things, total cross-platform audience (television, web and mobile), involvement (active Google searches and other search numbers) and advocacy (press mentions and word of mouth buzz).

“Content Power Ratings 2.0 allows us to better understand the total value that a program represents for advertisers and unearth surprise hits that deliver better value than their audience ratings would imply,” said Greg Kahn, Senior Vice President/head of Strategic Insights for Optimedia US.

Shows like “Lost” and “Heroes” rank well under this type of criteria, because both shows foster a lot of participation and communities online and although smaller in size, tend to develop more devoted and engaged fans.

Looking at numbers this way also gives you a deeper sense of what your audience is connecting to with your product, and what those numbers actually mean. Engagement is key.

You can read the Content Power Ratings announcement here.

Taking a quick glance down the Top 100 Followed List on Twitter it’s just your typical who’s who of celebrities, tv shows, corporations and random Internet stars. Nothing too out of the ordinary. But then, I stumbled across this brand new site TwitTruth which breaks down Twitter subscriber numbers even more.

TwitTruth shows a table of various engagement statistics including the account holders Reply rate, Direct Reply rate and, my favorite, % of Tweets that engage a user.

Now, all of a sudden that Top 100 List is starting to look VERY different and light gets shed on the “real” engagers of the site. Here are a few examples:

Diddy (iamdiddy):

- 935,000+ followers
- 1/412 chance of diddy responding to a direct message (eh, doesnt sound great)
- 2.5% of tweets engage a user (wow, bad).

When you have that many subscribers, every single message should engage SOMOENE.

Pete Cashmore of Mashable:

- 661,000+ followers
- 1/667 chance of Pete responding to a direct message
- 1% of tweets engage a user (isn’t he supposed to be the social media guru? This one didn’t surprise me, because his Twitter updates got so annoying to me, I turned it off for myself. They really are just updates that the blog is updated, but you think people would comment about the post he is promoting or something.)

Samantha Ronson:

- 324,000+ followers
- 1/14 chance of Samantha responding to a direct message (great odds!)
- 84% of tweets engage a user (now THERE is a number that you want to see).

Starbucks Coffee:

- 183,000+ followers
- 1/5 chance of Starbucks responding to a direct message (go praise that latte!)
- 84% of tweets engage a user (love the corporate social media responsibility!)

There’s just a snapshot to give you a taste, but you can see for yourself at TwitTruth.com.

So, what do you take from all this?

If you are going to spend all that time building a gigantic list of people, you better make sure that they are actually paying attention to you. 1 million subscribers? Who cares? Are they listening to you?

It’s the worst thing in the world, to have a subscriber base that large, but you can’t sell your product or do anything with it.

Wouldn’t you rather have a list of 5,000 ultra engaged people who pay attention and act on your messages? Or a list of 50,000 with only 1% listening to you? Do the math, that’s only 500 people. Pay attention to the bigger picture of what those follower numbers mean.

Go ahead, go look yourself up on TwitTruth too. I won’t look until you tell me to ;)

Go watch! 51 episodes are now on Hulu.

I’m loving the latest humor blogs to pop up mostly with user contributed content and people sharing their stories under a hilarious theme. These will definitely keep you busy.

1. MyMomIsAFob.com – Hilarious, particularly if you are Asian and can relate. Also see their spin off site MyDadIsAFob.com
2. TextsFromLastNight.com – I know you sent some in to this blog. Don’t lie.
3. AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com – Pretty new, but pretty hilarious.
4. PostcardsFromYoMomma.com – Kind of like My Mom Is A Fob but for everyone.
5. FMyLife.com – Self explanatory.

While surfing my morning headlines on CNN.com, one grabbed my attention titled “The Smartest Group In Pop Music?”. I rolled my eyes right away, but clicked through anyway and I was right. It was an article about some up and coming band out of Harvard named Chester French. There was an interview with the band and the story is about how Chester French is giving their new album away for free from their website and how now they are getting featured in a ton of magazines. Here’s a quote from the interview: “We’re doing something that’s never been done by a band before,” says lead singer D.A. Wallach.

First off D.A., it has been done before. Lots of times. In fact, here’s a recent one off the top of my head here: Radiohead gave their album away for free from their website, you could donate money for it if you wanted to, or just download it for free. Here’s another I just downloaded myself last week: Del tha Funkee Homosapien (amazing emcee and of Gorillaz fame) has his album in a nice tidy MP3 package available for you to download.

Second, it’s not the smartest move in the world. The Radiohead example above is actually a great example and I’ll show you why. Let’s remember a few principles:

1. People WILL pay for your music if you provide some value for it.

2. By offering it for free, you aren’t doing your fans a favor (unless you are an established band like Radiohead) you almost de-value yourself.

3. You provide value in a few ways:
a) Obviously it starts with the music, it has to be good!
b) Personal connection with fans. If fans feel a personal connection to you, your music or your band, suddenly people want to support you.
c) Add to the music, i.e. special packaging, limited editions, extra trinkets included. At Warner Bros. we did things like include a T-shirt with the package, include a CD of bonus content a la DVD special features, include special items like in the case of Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor there was a bound journal and photo book included.

So, let’s get back to Radiohead. They offered their music for free, but they let you put your own price on it, anywhere from $0 to $100.  Although a lot of people chose $0 and get the album for free, the people who DID pay for the music more often than not put a higher value than you would have paid for it at retail price. So, in the end it evened out to earn a similar amount of money as you would at retail.

If you look at this as a social and business test, you can almost put an actual price on what people’s perceived value of your brand and product is. It may surprise you how much higher it is than retail.

And how do you increase that perceived value? Through brand marketing, create a personal connection with your artist.

So, Chester French may be getting some hyper around their album right now, but starting with a perceived a value of $0 isn’t such a great idea. I doubt this will last…. unless their music is good, then it can speak for itself, but then if it IS good, why would you tell everyone it’s worthless?

Once again, I’m not impressed by Harvard trained boys.