by Craig Fifield – follow him on Twitter @CraigFifield
The other night just as I was done finishing up on Twitter @DannySullivan dropped a link to a Newsweek story and said:
gosh, change “twitter” to “blogs” in dan lyons rip on twitter & it could be 2004
Sullivan is usually spot on so with cold beer in hand and Xbox calling to me from the other room I reluctantly clicked through and started reading Don’t Tweet on Me by Daniel Lyons.
In it Mr. Lyons has many insightful thoughts on Twitter that got me going –
Twitter has become a playground for imbeciles
most of what streams across Twitter is junk
The genius of Twitter is that it manages to be even stupider than TV
forget all the stuff you’ve heard from bloviating Web gurus about Twitter being useful
While those quotes are juicy and begging me to bloviate all over them there’s only so much time in a guru’s day so I thought I’d focus on the one that hit closest to home — branding via Twitter.
Dane Cook tweets a lot of crap.
One of the major points Lyons makes is that @DaneCook is hurting his brand by Tweeting.
Dane Cook apparently believes he is building his brand by pumping out a steady stream of comments on Twitter
Cook’s comments are so lame and unfunny that what he’s actually doing is revealing, multiple times a day, how little talent he has
I’ll give credit where credit is do and admit Lyons is correct, Dane Cook is not funny (sorry, but you knew that was coming!)
But hurting his brand? Wow.
Lyons is really missing it on this one so I thought I should clarify.
Based on his statements I can only assume he is thinking of Dane’s brand in old school terms and thinks the act is Dane’s brand. Its not, he is the brand his act is only a piece of that.
Or to put that another way — his act is a tool (see what I did there?). It’s his main tool but it is still just a tool he uses to build the brand of Dane.
There are comedians that try to protect ‘the act’.
And where are they?
We still have other comedians out there somewhere, right?
If Dane was focused on protecting his act on Twitter he wouldn’t be nearly as successful. All he would share would be jokes we’ve all heard or stuff that had been tested and polished. Or nothing at all. Boring.
The people that follow Dane on Twitter do so because they like him enough that they want to get to know him better. That is what Dane is doing with his drivel – building his brand by getting closer to his audience. As Lyons put it “lame jokes”, “pointless babble” and all.
In fact, all that lame stuff is exactly what his fans want. They want him to tweet the bad jokes, what he ate, what he thinks of Newsweek, etc, etc — that is the real Dane.
The more he tweets the stronger his brand becomes.
Dane is a smart twit because he knows that communicating with his audience, getting to know them, and most importantly letting them know him is where the magic happens.
He is what people want on Twitter, not his “material”.
He is the brand, not his act.
What Dane has built by giving himself to the audience in this way is much more powerful than a comedy act. He’s built a serious brand and his tweets played a large role.
How about them cookies?
Quotes from Lyons’ own story prove how powerful this type of Twittering can be:
Kutcher has 3.5 million Twitter followers, and Simpson has 1.5 million (Dane has 1.3m)
they’ve built bigger audiences than a lot of TV shows.
Exactly.
Mr. Lyons might not like what they are tweeting but their fans clearly do.
What’s more important is that they’ve built their own audiences that they own (not some network) much of which is due to them tweeting a lot of “pointless” stuff on Twitter.
As long as they stay true to their audience in their tweets they don’t need TV, Movies, or comedy shows anymore — they could all bake cookies and still be successful.
That is powerful stuff.
That is branding today.
That is Dane, Ashton, and Ashlee owning it.
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@jasondrohn
Nice post Craig. I really think you hit the nail on the head in your post – new media branding is about establishing personality and identity with the people who you WANT to influence.
It is next to impossible to please everyone all the time. And the person that tries to do that is a fool. But growing your core audience, your core group of followers, that’s what Twitter is all about.
– Jason Drohn
@ShotOfCoffee
I really think that’s why a lot of people in general that aren’t on twitter, don’t get the point. I’ve tried to explain to some of my friends, and most of them don’t believe that there’s really any use for it. There’s so much more to it then what you see if you just look at a twitter stream. There’s so many ways to promote yourself, website or business.
@DarinRMcClure
Twitter rules, I tell my friends who want to check it out that its FB updates without all the zombies and stupid games. Forest for the trees, Google is a marketing company, Twitter is real live, real time search, and reader is the next big thing…
@carlweaver
Good post. However, I wonder how much of a brand people really build using Twitter. On one hand, it is important to stay in front of your viewers and also to connect to them on a personal level like this. However, how much of that gets diluted? Who is following Dane, Ashlee and Ashton, and how many other people are they following? Does anyone look at a whole stream of tweets by one individual? What is the effective lifespan of one tweet?
I would guess that most of what is on Twitter, while not necessarily junk, goes unread by most followers. At very least, it is not acted on by a lot of people. Most users likely don’t closely follow many other people, and many of the messages out there get lost. This is the downside to Twitter. Even the celebrities I follow, like @BreaGrant and @ChrisBrogan, I rarely search for or look in their histories more than a few tweets back. There’s just too much out there to read.
Sorry to bloviate all up in your comments section.
@craigfifield
Glad you liked it Jason. I couldn’t agree with you agreeing with me more!
@aprces
Act is just a part of one’s branding,which will take advantage of one’s existing branding to promote itself again and again
Great post! You said it perfectly. Maybe Lyons will learn a few things and not continue to prove to his boss that he’s old and irrelevant.
Beth
@nealwiser
While Danny Sullivan is a tech guru, he doesn’t understand the entertainment business. In the biz, the entertainers ARE their brands, and Twitter is going to have an impact. Picture this scenario; Superstars “A” and “T” are both up for the same part in a (hopeful) summer blockbuster. Both get pretty hefty paydays, so there’s a lot of money on the line, not to mention what impact casting one over the other may have for the marketing prospects for the film. As a studio exec savvy to the Internet (yeah, I know. Science Fiction, but bear with me), he checks how many followers each has. “A” has 3+ million. And “T”? Wait a second, is “T” even ON twitter? So Mr. Exec is thinking is he casts “A,” he can reach an extra 3 million people through Twitter and pump up his opening night gross. As for “T”? Maybe “T” is afraid that if he doesn’t get enough followers, his quote will go down. Well guess what, “T” has ZERO followers. “A” gets the part.
I’ll be the first to admit that Twitter is about quality, not quantity. But that’s for me. If I were “T,” I’d be looking for a new PR agent who can guarantee at least 5 million followers.
I don’t think Craig could be any more right!
It is not about the act, it is about communicating directly with your fans. While I might not want to know what Dane Cook had for breakfast, one of his die hard fans/followers might.
@rebeccawoodhead
So all the mindless nonsense I spout on Twitter is building my brand is it, Onion Man? What a terrifying thought. Mind you, the idea that we’re allowed to be ourselves however quirky is liberating.
Good post,
Rebecca
@JoselinMane
Craig,
Good article and great topic for discussion.
One thing that main stream media, and critics for that matter are lacking to see, is that we are living in an opt-in world and that Twitter is a self regulating system. Meaning that if a person, say Dane Cook is not entertaining me via his tweets, I can simply unfollow. So it really doesn’t matter if I don’t personally like someone’s tweets because I may not be in that person’s core demographic, or the tweets may simply just be for someone else.
Dan waits until the last two sentences to conclude with. “Who cares if he’s not funny? The venture capitalists behind Twitter will be laughing all the way to the bank.” So Dan effectively writes the whole article harping on Dane Cook, only to come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter.
So if @DaneCook or whoever has a large twitter following is able to tweet nonsense and still maintain a large audience, I am unsure how critics can say it’s damaging their brand.
Now http://twitter.com/realdanlyons, who is following 27 and only has 727 followers, seems to just use twitter as a news wire service versus a tool to make connections. Can it be said that he is damaging his brand by not actually engaging in conversations with his audience?
@obedward
The art of being true to yourself has always been a principle of mine. I think that the fad of being someone that you’re not is “fading” away. I mean really, people like honesty and real down to earth people. Sure everybody love lies and fakes, until they find out that they’re lies and fakes. Get it?
I agree that Dane Cook isn’t funny. Each of those 1.3 million followers is probably an idiot. /s
I mean seriously, do we have to shit on every person who becomes popular in this country? Seriously, before he became huge, people loved Dane Cook’s stand up. He may have been over exposed (and that would relate to this article) but he isn’t not funny. You don’t get four television specials and three best selling cds by not being funny.
Seriously Craig Fifield, I hope you are a better Internet Marketing consultant than a guest blogger (I didn’t mean that, but it sucks when people crap on you, huh?)
Very good and smart post. I too have read Lyons “Dont Tweet on Me”, which is sadly derived from “Dont tread on Me”, a very iconic American quote. You are correct in most areas, if not all. The biggest thing that Lyons missed was that people like Dane Cook are popular because of it and its who they are. If their fan base hated that people like Dane did this then their popularity would not be what it is. It is the fact that they are that keep them popular and to gain in popularity. Also it seems as though Lyons indirectly called most of America stupid and idiots, which is overlooked.
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J. Web
@raena
You actually aren’t disproving his point. Dane Cook’s tweets are stupid and inane. Twitter is full of stupid, inane crap. Stupid, inane crap is popular.
Saying it’s powerful branding doesn’t change the fact that it’s low-value swill. I think that’s the point he was making.