This week saw the culmination of a 48 hour Twitter popularity campaign between British Comedian Russell Brand, and the US talk show host, Jimmy Fallon. (Watch the tv interview here)
Before the campaign began, Fallon began with a distinct 200,000 follower head-start but it was Brand that actually achieved more in the build up to his TV appearance on ‘Late Night with Jimmy Fallon’ where he plugged his US stand-up and book signing tour.
A combination of blog posts, tweets, retweets, Facebook updates and video pleas resulted in Russell increasing his followers by 23%, that’s an additional 17,000 people he can now directly inform of his latest tour, book, movie etc.
This is a great example of how social media is still a strong brand communication and advertising medium despite having a ‘faddy’ nature. FriendsReunited was replaced with Facebook, which is now facing stiff competition from Twitter, but whatever the latest Web 2.0 craze is it needs to be utilised by brands in order to stay in touch with their target audience as well as maintain their brand reputation.
A recent post on NMA highlights this need for early adoption and exploitation of such tools as big brands like Coca-Cola, Debenhams and Adidas are facing an ever increasing army of ‘cyber-squatters’ who claim their usernames, pose as representatives, and often leave negative comments and feedback.
Celebrities using Twitter are also victims of ‘cyber-squatting’. Russell Brand currently commands over 97,000 followers under the pseudonym, rustyrockets, however squatters have successfully setup similar accounts with the names rustyrocket and russellbrand, and now have a combined following of over 16,000, as they pretend to be Russell Brand. In fact the Brand v Fallon battle resulted in these squatter Twitter accounts receiving a 9% increase in followers.
Graph showing the spike in followers for the @Russellbrand squatter account
Now throw into the mix Bryan Brinkman. “Who’s Bryan Brinkman?”I hear you ask. He’s a cartoonist that was simply in the audience for the ‘Late Night with Jimmy Fallon’ show on Wednesday night, Fallon and co followed him and asked the world to do the same, so they did. At the start of the show he had just 7 followers on Twitter, at the time of writing this it had jumped to 28,857 (and climbing). That’s a 412,143% increase in less than 2 days!! But what does this mean for Bryan, will his animation work get noticed or is he simply yesterdays fad as the masses wait to be led to the next latest craze? There’s no doubt that traffic to his website (www.brinkanimation.com) would have significantly increased and he is likely to have already received some job/commission offers of the back of this!
So what are the implications of all this for brands? Well first of all it demonstrates the brand exposure that can be achieved off the back of social media. This shouldn’t be ignored, but instead embraced by brands. Secondly it highlights the issue of ‘cyber-squatting’ or ‘brand-squatting’. Just take the Russell Brand ‘brand-squatting’ (pardon the pun) example highlighted above. Arguably it may not be such an issue for Russell but if you are a big brand then it can be damaging.
Checkusernames.com - Example run for Debenhams
Therefore, it may be worth using a tool such as CheckUsernames.com which allows you to search the availability of your company’s name on over 100 influential social media and Web 2.0 sites. This way you can identify your brand squatters and register your brand name on the important sites before someone else does!
Tags: Reputation Management, Social Media, Stu Bowker, Twitter
