But I Only Have 51 followers
I'm a social media expert, not a Twitter expert but I am having fun watching all the excitement it is causing. As shown in my recent interviews in the New York Daily News http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/2009/06/06/2009-06-06_twitter.html , Kansas City Star http://www.kansascity.com/sports/story/1237625-p2.html .
All the hype, awe and fear is not new and will continue when the next show happens. "Social Media applications are like television shows not Television networks" is one of our mantra's here at pLot. The hype around them causes the best of us to overvalue and misconstrue their nature. When Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace he thought he was buying a media property like the NY Post or Fox Network. WRONG! MySpace is a show. Television shows like American Idol though very valuable are not worth over $500 million. I remember all the media hype around MySpace and it reminds me of all of this Twitter talk which is like American Idol hype or any other hot entertainment property when it is first adopted by the mass society. When the hype dies down and the ratings go south television shows jump the shark and so do social networks which MySpace has done this whole last year in efforts to become more Facebook like. Writers and producers get fired as has and is happening in the MySpace case. The titans of media don't even get what all the this new media stuff means because the brains that advise them have no idea. There is no study for whats happening in new media because it's too new, too organic and it's changing too fast. There is no book to study at Wharton business school or class at Syracuse Communications school. We at pLot know this stuff because we build social media applications from the software up. We know what happens when you launch, host and secure a social network and we know it's volatile nature. Like the Daily News and Kansas City Star, maybe the barons of Media need to call a guy like me that actually builds these applications in the real virtual world (now there's an oxymoron for you) to help evaluate the value and staying power of social networks and before the next guy buys Twitter for a billion dollars.