At 2:25 a.m. ET, CNN sent the following breaking news alert:
“– Ashton Kutcher is first to reach 1 million followers in Twitter contest with CNN.”
Ashton Kutcher's page on Twitter.com
For those who didn’t know (or care) actor Ashton Kutcher has been involved in a battle with CNN over who could reach 1,000,000 Twitter followers first. (Full Story) Apparently both waged an all out campaign last night to break seven figures. Kutcher won the battle. (CNN broke the 1,000,000 mark, too.)
But, I’d argue that both Kutcher and CNN will lose the war, for Twitter is not about how many followers you have. What is truly important is how many people you are following.
CNN is the bigger loser here. On their breaking news Twitter account, CNN is following six (6) Twitterers. Six. That’s it.
Kutcher is doing a little better, following 73 people.
As I have written before, the real value of Twitter for big media companies is the ability to get a real-time pulse of people’s reactions to events and circumstances. Perhaps media commentator Terry Heaton explained it best:
“Twitter is being used by media companies as another form of mass media — which is fine — but its real value is as a listening post. I think if all we do is accumulate followers and blast them with tweets, we’ll end up talking to ourselves, because conversational media must be 2-way in order for the conversation to take place. And anybody who thinks all those followers are glued to their every word is fooling themselves.
“Twitter is another case of legacy media taking a new technology and bolting it onto its existing model, rather than exploring how it is really used among the geeks who created it. We certainly should be using Twitter, but the smart media companies will recognize and pursue both sides of the conversation.”
As for Kutcher, I think we can all assume that his pursuit of 1,000,o00 was a mostly vain experiment to boost his already inflated ego. Good for him. Bad for CNN.
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