Ashton vs. CNN (well, actually CNNbrk)

Update 1:16am - May 14, 2009

I was on a bus from NYC to Philly. The bus had wifi but wouldn't let me load the USstream.tv website. Odd. Anyway, here it is for those of us who didn't get to see it.

Ashton doing a ding dong ditch. Of course, he had to change it up because you can't just walk up to Ted Turner's front door ;)



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Update: 11:18pm - It's done, baby, done. Ashton beat CNN and that was pretty bad ass to witness via webcam.

Thanks to anyone who followed my lead and added him! It's a victory for new media. Things are changing.
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I don't know if you've been following this madness, but a couple of days ago Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN and Ted Turner to a contest. Basically, if he got to 1,000,000 followers on Twitter before CNNbrk (Breaking News), he'd ding, dong, ditch Ted Turner's house.

However, then he added that he'd donate 10,000 nets to prevent malaria. This cause is something that he tweeted about a couple of days before the challenge. That's also when I decided to take him seriously and urge him on and encourage others to follow him too. Also, today, I realized I was following CNNbrk, so I stopped, for now. I'll follow them again when this is all over.

Now in the land that is the Internet there are a lot of haters out there who don't seem to get it. Brian Solis, however, does. For that his post on the topic is well worth posting here.

BTW, if you're not on Twitter, get on it and follow Ashton Kutcher: http://www.twitter.com/aplusk

Ashton and Evan Williams, one of the founders of Twitter will be on Oprah tomorrow. I'll be in Yosemite, so I'm going to miss all of this, but tune in if you're in the States. It ought to be fun to watch.

However, if this is the first you've heard of this, read what Solis has to say.

Also, folks in the K-blogosphere, if you still pay attention to what I write (and I hope some of you do), get on Twitter and follow Ashton. Thanks ;)

It's close y'all: HuffPo - Twitter Showdown

The Race to 1,000,000 Followers Sends Twitter and Social Media into Relevance and Irrelevance

Source

It started as a simple and seemingly harmless contest. Who would be the first person on Twitter to reach 1,000,000 followers?

This wasn’t yet another follower push open to just anyone on Twitter however, not even the Weblebrities who helped propel the popular micro community to an emerging, iconic pop culture status; it was (and at the moment, still is) a race between the world’s most visible celebrities and prominent media brands.

It started when Ashton Kutcher, a television and movie star who’s also keenly astute and observant to the promise of new media challenged CNN and its founder, Ted Turner to the race.

It was the match heard round the blogosphere, twitterverse and statusphere.

Shortly thereafter, Britney Spears, Will Smith and a bevy of opportunistic celebrities (and their publicists) and media properties (driven by their PR teams) followed suit. Britney’s team offered chances to win free tickets in exchange for followers. Other celebrities (who shall remain anonymous, DM’d followers to ask for help in spreading the word.)

The competition quickly became a media phenomenon.

Ashton and Twitter Co-Founder Evan Williams are now expected to appear on the Oprah show tomorrow, which will coincide with almost every leading competitor surpassing 1,000,000 followers on the same day. The publicity was enough to inspire Oprah to start tweeting.


Sarah Ross, Ashton Kutcher, TechCrunch50

At the time of this post, CNNbrk was in the lead with 977,02 followers, with Ashton Kutcher following closely with 973,806, and Britney Spears in third with 944,273.

Initially I questioned the exchange. I couldn’t help but feel as though “we the people” on Twitter were merely viewed as pawns in a personal chess match between the elite.

Think about it. If Twitter had 6-7 million users, we’re talking about 1 in every 6 or so users following one of the contenders.

I threw the question out to Twitter, “How do you feel about the race to 1,000,000?”

The response was almost overwhelming in its volume and vigor, spanning across Twitter and Facebook over the course of several hours.

While the publicity for Twitter and the overall medium that is Social Media is incredible and sprawling, I believe that the purpose and deeper meaning of having 1,000,000 followers on Twitter or any social network, will be lost to the fervor that fuels this “contest” – unless we’re comfortable holding the title of “follower” a.k.a. social pauper. I highly doubt that any brand will view this special achievement of having cultivated 1 million followers as an opportunity to “engage” in “conversations” with their communities. Intention is easily assessable by simply viewing the latest tweets via www.twitter.com/username.

But in Ashton’s case, it’s so much deeper. I believe his intentions are genuine.

Should he win, he’s promised to donate 10,000 mosquito nets to help fight malaria. After promising the nets, he then dedicated the nets either way. Using social media to build a platform for self-promotion or a top-down distribution channel for propaganda and messages is, in the spirit of the social web, anti-social. To demonstrate that any individual can earn influence for which to wield freely and graciously in the name of social good is symbolic of the true spirit of Social Media.

In his own words, Kutcher so passionately defines what has inspired many of us over the last several years in our work to help cultivate the foundation for social media and the very people powering its evolution, “So why is this significant? This is a huge statement for Social Media. For one person to actually have the ability to broadcast to as many people as a major media network, sort of signifies the turning of the tide from tradition news outlets to social news outlets. With our video cameras on cell phones, picture cams, blogging, twittering, posting, and Facebooking, we actually become the source of the news, the broadcasters of the news, and the consumers of the news…we have the potential on this day to turn the tide…where social media and social news outlets can become as powerful as the major news outlets. We’re doing that with the help of you. It’s sort of power to the people and I like that, a lot.”



We participate on social networks to express ourselves and share a piece of who we are in the real world, online, to forge relationships with people we respect, trust, and admire and it inspires us to share, learn, and grow together. With every tweet and update, we reveal a bit of what we stand for and what moves us, forming a unique social graph that contextually connects us to others in an irreproducible network. It’s unique to each one of us, and it’s both empowering and powerful.

We become media.

We become influencers.

We are the source of the social seismographs that spark reverberating tremors that represent the potential to create a webwide social effect.

We’re shifting into a rapid-fire culture that moves at Twitter time. Attention is a precious commodity and requires a personalized engagement strategy in order to consistently vie for it. The laws of attraction and relationships management are driven by the ability to create compelling content and transparently connect it to the people whom you believe benefit.

Twitter and the statusphere have become our attention dashboards, the new ecosystem for sharing, discovering, and publishing updates and micro-sized content that reverberates throughout social networks and syndicated profiles, resulting in a formidable network effect of activity. It is the digital curation of relevant content that binds us contextually and through the statusphere we can connect directly to existing contacts, reach new people, and also forge new friendships through the friends of friends effect (FoFs) in the process.

Is having one million followers sustainable? Better yet, is it engaging or welcoming? Can you genuinely listen to and converse with a community that rivals the population of small countries?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter...not anymore. If you are a curator of highly relevant information, thoughts, beliefs, opinions, and motivating substance, then you can potentially flourish into a fountain of inspiration that channels content to the beacons and ambassadors who also represent interconnected human networks. It’s how we communicate now.

Dr. Dunbar, theorized that the size of the human brain allows a stable network of about 148 contacts, which has become known as “the Dunbar number.” In Social Networks however, real world relationships have evolved into something altogether different and perhaps more authoritative. Now, individuals can follow and are followed by thousands or (eventually) millions of "friends" across the Conversation Prism. This is a new breed of personal branding and expert and themed curation tethered to a peer network that exemplifies fandom and creates a platform for peer-to-peer influence. And, we may or may not ever know the people who choose to follow our updates or friend us on these popular and emerging networks. Our human network is defined by reach, not just in one community, but through the syndication of multiple social networks.

For Ashton, reaching one million followers represents the potential of socialized media, the future of information discovery and distribution, and the connectedness of contextual human networks. For the others, collecting followers represents the ability to push information to a faceless list of avatars using a new medium. As followers, we’re simply relegated to subscribers and fans, nothing less, nothing more.

The future of Social Media lies with those who can create, cultivate, and empower individuals to produce and share meaningful content and activity to inspire action, foster education, instigate change and build a more media literate society.

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