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.

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.

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?)

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?

Good post,

Rebecca

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.

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.

Beth