Ashton Kutcher won the race to a million Twitter followers because of his enthusiasm, his star power, his likability, the fight against malaria (and future causes to come), his supportive and co-tweeting wife and just enough tech savvy to make the whole story compelling. After last week’s stretch run he’s been crowned the de facto king of Twitter, and will hold that title unless and until Oprah gets up to speed and starts engaging with her followers rather than just making announcements.
Throughout the chase with CNN, we heard a lot on Twitter and on his streaming video channel (especially in the excitement of the night, with friends and other celebs crowded around him at his desk) about how this accomplishment was a validation of the “social media revolution.” “I actually see this as a historical day,” he said as he began his broadcast. “I mean it’s truly the television versus the web.”But it’s not television versus the web; you can watch television on the web. The Internet is a little bit of everything; it’s not accurate to exclude television as a completely separate medium. It’s another part of what makes the web… the web. What he said at another point, and the more important message, I think, is that it’s about the dissemination of messages (original posts, RTs and @-replies) by the same people who consume those messages, versus the one-way type of communication that has defined television for the past sixty years:“At the end of the day, what’s this about? This is about the changing of the guard, from the old way of consuming media to the new way of consuming media. We, together can decide… can make the news on our cell phones, on our iPhones, on our cameras, on our video cameras. We can edit the news. We can broadcast the news and we can consume the news. We can decide what news we want to hear, how we want to hear it, when we want to hear it, and we can get it faster on the web. That’s all we’re saying.”While the idea of a “social media revolution” is an interesting thought, and Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and others (is MySpace still online?) have done much to move forward the idea that this medium can be the breeding ground of many millions of Butterfly Effect messages and follow-up actions every day, with the incredible potential for good, I’d like to suggest that the momentum behind the Twitter-based part of that revolution is unsustainable because of its most basic nature – the fact that it’s just text. Real people are more than their byline, their quotes or their description. Moreover, we don’t know the real intentions of the people who helped Mr. Kutcher get to a million. We don’t even know if they are real people – Twitter doesn’t require an email address before you start posting so theoretically someone could sign up a million times. The person who won a prize as the millionth follower, at the time he started following Mr. Kutcher, had no avatar, zero followers and was following nobody else. More significantly, why, we have to ask ourselves, do people even have thirty thousand or more followers and why do they follow those thirty thousand or more people back? Are all thirty thousand that interesting and important or is it just a numbers game? How can they possibly keep up and truly interact with that mass of humanity, the twenty, thirty, fifty messages every minute? It’s a system of dissemination that is so filled with noise that in the good tweets we are clearly seeing only the tip of the iceberg. It stands to reason that too often the important messages or the brilliant, insightful tweets are not seen or acknowledged unless they happen to be re-tweeted by an @aplusk or @mrskutcher, a @guykawasaki or maybe, eventually, an @oprah.In an off-handed but telling statement in the heat of his pursuit of 1 million followers, Mr. Kutcher said he knew we were getting tired of all the retweets and the “follow @aplusk” posts, but that soon we’d be able to get back to telling people what we had for breakfast or that we were on our way to the doctor or etc. It was meant to be funny and he knows as well as anyone that those aren’t the sort of updates that are generally useful or encouraged on Twitter, but still, they’re there in abundance. Add to that all the people who follow new people all day long in hopes they’ll follow back, who openly state that their profession is “Internet Marketing” or “Success Coaching” which means they rely on Twitter and other social media to disseminate information about their new ad-splashed blog entry or their “make money online” e-book. And there it is in a nutshell – amidst the amazing accomplishment of one million plus people following one famous person’s short messages, amidst the fight against malaria and human trafficking, there is simply a huge amount of noise made by an astonishing number of Twitter accounts, and the noise is crippling Twitter (literally, “fail-whaling” it much of the day, every day) and crippling its ability to do much good. The messages that do matter, however – the tweets that somehow lead us to care about the people affected: the children fighting for their lives against malaria, for example – have to point to something more than just text if they’re going to make us care. Just like at some point along the way in SEO / Internet Marketing there *has* to be a purchase to pay for the advertising upon advertising, the razor-thin margins in arbitrage that make the Internet go, at some point along the mechanism of caring there has to be a real person. And Twitter in and of itself is not going to present us that real person or even make them relevant. There are cases where text is all it takes to get involved, but it’s not real emotion. To feel real emotion you need to not just follow but also see the web site of the real-life story of a boy fighting brain cancer (@jonthanjay). You need to see dozens of follow-up messages and thank-yous from someone who maybe threatened suicide on Twitter but was coaxed back from the brink due to a sudden outpouring of support, and inevitably the community will seek out and embrace that person in real life (“I found her MySpace page. Looks like she lives in Indonesia”). Bottom line, to become emotionally engaged we have to see images and video or at the very least read passages longer than tweets. And we have to see and hear good stories because in the end, Twitter is less powerful as a motivator than the images and commercials provided by Jamie Lee Curtis and the Save the Children Foundation. Mr. Kutcher implicitly acknowledged this when during the stretch run he moved from Twitter to his video broadcast. Twitter in and of itself is simply not enough – there has to be a audio/visual component (if not an in-person meeting) in order for people to connect and to believe. You cannot have a revolution with one hundred and forty characters of text. Enough words have been said about the other big story on the web last week, the emergence of Susan Boyle into our consciousness and our hearts. But I’d like to reiterate what we all know: that it wasn’t simply her exceptional voice. It was the person, the dramatic and very well-done editing (the over-mascara’d “ohmygod”, the sighs, tsk-tsks and “yeah right”s in the audience), the eyebrows and the sweetness, the frumpiness and the never-been-kissed that turned a beautiful and well-sung song into a performance that has literally changed the lives of so many people.So where does this leave us? I certainly do believe that social media can do great things, but like anything there’s a coordinate system that contributes to those great things, and Twitter is just one of the cogs in that system. It’s a means to mobilization and maybe with some better search filtering it can be a better accumulator and more accurate disseminator of information. But it’s not yet and never will be real, engaging, human communication. What did Ashton Kutcher do after the Twitter million? He went on Oprah. He went on Larry King Live. And he brought those shows – their star power and their viewers – into his realm. He integrated the power of the separate mediums, the separate networks of people and ideas, and showed Larry and Oprah and the world how the Twitter cog works. And that coordination – not the negation of one of its pieces – is where the revolution lives.TT
