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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
What Martha’s Twitter Followers Want  Martha herself collected that many followers to her famously popular Twitter feed. “It’s pretty phenomenal, and I’m quite astonished at the ease with which you can get a following like that in this day and age,” she told New York Times columnist David Carr in a far-reaching interview in May at the DeSilva+Phillips Future of Celebrity Media conference. The investment bank recently released the edited interview as part of its ongoing reports on celebrity in media. The interview makes clear that Stewart has been pondering the place a micro-blog medium has within the larger omni-media universe of her blogs, sites, radio, TV and magazines. Stewart admits that she herself is still unsure why the phenomenon has taken off so quickly. “I haven’t found exactly what these people want,” she says. “This is a new audience too. It’s not my subscribers. It’s not my readers.” In an unscientific poll of her Twitter followers about why they use Twitter, Stewart received 1,600 responses in a few hours, and the fragmented response suggests that the audience too is coming to the platform from many directions. Why Martha’s Followers Use Twitter 24% Social Networking 22% Following Celebrities 20% News and Information 16% Social Advertising/Blog Links 11% Curiosity 7% Boredom Stewart maintains that she does post her own tweets, usually about four a day, with the rare exception that her assistant Eliad Laskin will post when she is out of touch. She finds that tune-in prompts for her Sirius radio show are extremely effective in driving call-ins and she posts just before starting the show. Stewart believes that the 22% of her Twitter followers who are there to follow celebrities tells us something about the tone and purpose of the platform for many. “What they really want to know is that you are like them. You are a human being. You are part of the group. That you can talk to them at that level.” Stewart admits that Twitter does represent a shortening of attention spans that poses a threat to all of the other media she produces and relies on for revenue. It can be difficult to move significant shares of her massive crowd to her blog where she can inform them in richer ways. “Trying to get that 600,000 to go to a blog to learn something is hard. I have found that,” she says. And a medium of drive-by sentiment can be distracting users from substance and keep too many people tweeting “all day long.” “I think they are misguided; and maybe they should be inspired somehow. I don’t think the tweets can inspire as effectively as a real blog can, or a real communication, or a real magazine or a real book. And I worry about that.” She also worries that over-commercializing the channel will turn people away. “People will get bored if you only use it to sell. I think they won’t get bored if you use it to inform.” Stewart says she uses the platform as a listening post both to her readers’ replies but also to a group of leaders. “The people I follow really give me the information in certain areas that I want and need. You can edit your information flow very nicely on a thing like Twitter.” She also plans to target specific sub-groups in her audience, such as brides-to-be and gardeners, with specific questions. Stewart seems to be discovering that Twitter is an effective point of contact with an audience but not necessarily the most effective way to drive the core mission of a brand. While Stewart is a celebrity in her right and has a different presence on Twitter from a magazine brand, her experiences suggest how tentative and new Twitter remains in the mediasphere. Ken Sonenclar, managing director of Desilva+Phillips and editor of the report tells minonline, “Martha’s place in the publishing world, though not unique, is very special. Her personal celebrity and her role as media mogul feed each other in a virtuous cycle these days. Consequently – like Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres, and a handful of others – she can use her personal celebrity to channel interest to her media business. But even without the A-list name attached, publishers can make great marketing use of Twitter as long as they have interesting things to say and speak with a genuine voice. It’s all about attention. It helps, but you don’t have to be Martha to get and keep people’s attention.” As of July 1, Martha Stewart’s Twitter page has 934,000 followers. The edited interview with Stewart is now available from Desilva+Phillips. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com |
 Manager, Digital Media, NCC Media
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Also, the fact that she says tweets can’t inspire like blogs or books can makes me think she doesn’t truly understand the medium. Twitter is an engine that drives content destinations, but isn’t itself a destination and isn’t meant to be. It’s a place where you share links to useful blog posts, articles and products, not where you produce comprehensive content. This online content, in turn, fuels Twitter. They’re complementary, not competing.
She is right that Twitter shouldn’t be used to sell, however. We’re all in information overload. Contribute something new, useful or interesting, or you won’t gain anything by saying it.