A+K = 1,000,000

Posted by Anastasia Clarkson / April 20, 2009 2:05 pm 

On Friday Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) reached one million twitter followers. And we all care .

If there are 5 million people on twitter that means 20% of twitterers are following @aplusk.  Twenty percent of everyone is a lot.

Having direct broadcast to 1mm people who’ve pledged to listen is a great deal of power.  I urge @aplusk to follow Spidey’s credo “with great power comes great responsibility”. In other words, “Dude, don’t punk us”.

Ashton has a humanitarian side.  He pledged to donate 10,000 mosquito nets (which translates to a donation of  $100k) if he reached the milestone before CNN. He inspired Ryan Seacrest (@ryanseacrest) and Oprah (@oprah) to donate 20,000 (Oprah always tops everybody).  And he publicly asked P Diddy (@iamdiddy) to pledge too.

But wealthy famous people being philanthropic in front of their audience is not a new practice.  It’s always nice to see philanthropy, but it’s not remarkable.  What is remarkable is getting a million people to act in concert towards a common goal.  It would really be something if Ashton could get his followers to act in concert towards a good cause.

He has dabbled in these en masse exercises before, including calling on his followers to sign the guestbook of a sick child, and also more self-serving efforts to show off for his wife using the Grand Gesture tactic. He asked his followers to send love tweets to @mrskutcher on his behalf so that her twitter feed would be flooded with warm greetings when she woke up and checked it.  She got 3600 tweets in 7 minutes.

He seems to be interested in harnessing his influence for good, not evil, and as @MarthaStewart might say, “it’s a good thing”.

So it didn’t “just happen”, should we be so surprised?  Should we feel outraged? Looking back at last week -the billboards, the Oprah show timing, it adds up to a large effort.  The 1mm followers were earned by Team Ashton, and the level of calculation is disappointing to those followers who felt like they had been given a special insider connection to the celebrity.  It’s a reminder that Ashton isn’t just a guy, he’s an aspiring media mogul.

A famous guy just got a little more famous. I am not outraged. I am waiting to be impressed.

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  • Heidi Skinner

    Wow, 2 twitter posts back to back. Well said, Ana. I’m still not understanding why these “twelebrties” are getting cult-like followings. Is it because “ordinary people” feel like they will get more friends by association, or is it b/c they truly feel like they want to listen to what the celebrity has to say? I think it’s the former, which is kinda lame. I’ve only had people say “Hey, I’m AK’s friend on twitter,” or “Are you following @Oprah, are you?” Never, has someone approached me with “Did you hear about that profound tweet from @RyanSeacrest?”

  • http://www.criticalmass.com Len Kendall

    I’m wondering if these celebritweeters are being followed by the same people reading Perezhilton or Just Jared. Their young, web savvy, and interested in celebrity trash so using Twitter to get a direct line to the celebs they stalk makes a lot of sense.

    Also it should be mentioned that of the 1MM+ followers that Ashton or others have, most of them may not be very “active” twitter users. For many the Twitter feed is treated similar to an RSS.

  • http://www.criticalmass.com Karolina

    People follow celebrities wherever they are, physically or virtually. This is nothing new.

    Len and Heidi: what are your thoughts on what would happen if a celebrity associated with a brand and a cause would do the same thing? (For example if Salma Hayek tweeted from her vaccination drive in Sierra Leone?)

  • Jooles

    I started following @tonyhawk and @lancearmstrong thinking I’d like to know what they’re up to but quickly realized I don’t care. Solution? Unfollowed.

  • Anastasia Clarkson

    Regarding why people follow celebrities:
    Twitter is about connecting. As Moses Ma reports on Psychology Today http://tinyurl.com/cd7w4a , using twitter is one way to fulfill our basic and universal need to feel connected with other humans. We (collectively as a society) hold celebrities as special, so when one of us “regular joe’s” makes a connection with a celebrity, it makes us feel a little more special. And it’s up to the individual to determine how authentic, reciprocal, and valuable that connection is. For some people, that connection holds a lot of value, no matter how artificial or one-way others may view it.

    Len, you bring up a good point. Auto-followers notwithstanding, I think we can count the action of following as meaningful, but not necessarily as active or sustained. Maybe we should think separately about the act of following and the act of listening, or sustained listening (and not assume that following is an indication of listening).

    It would be interesting to see some attempts at measuring listening –something like the thread “views” count that appears on some forums. The challenge of course is that people access twitter through so many different platforms.

  • http://tinystage@blogspot.com john clarkson

    Could celebrity wind up killing Twitter? It’ll be interesting to watch….This Twitter phenom reminds me of the book the Andromeda Strain, where the protagonists watch the virus evolve over days–not eons. Enjoyed the post, and will follow on my blog reader!

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