The jury is out on who is the media leader in our contemporary world. On one side of the divide is the mainstream media, represented by CNN a leading international TV broadcaster and on the other side is social media, represented by Ashton Kutcher an American actor and former fashion model.
I first got wind of this shameless war on CNN. I monitored a video clip with CNN’s Larry King responding to Ashton Kutcher about a challenge. Apparently, the clash had started before that. Ashton Kutcher had challenged the media giant to having the most followers on Twitter.com
Kutcher challenged CNN to the race with a Web video posted on Tuesday. If he wins, Kutcher says he will “ding-dong ditch” CNN founder Ted Turner’s house.
“I found it astonishing that one person can actually have as big of a voice online as what an entire media company can on Twitter,” Kutcher says in a video, which was shot from inside a car and was posted on Qik.com.
“So I just thought that was just kind of an amazing comment on the state of our media, and I said that, if I beat CNN to 1 million viewers, then I would ding-dong ditch Ted Turner — because I don’t think it’s gonna happen.”
Before now, no single Twitter account had up to a million followers. CNN maintains 45 official Twitter accounts, with a total of more than 1.3 million followers. Kutcher was racing the network’s breaking-news feed specifically.
According to twitterholic.com, the 5 most popular Twitter users are:
- Ashton Kutcher (aplusk)
- CNN Breaking News (cnnbrk)
- Britney Spears (britneyspears)
- The Ellen Show (TheEllenShow)
- Twitter (twitter)
- Barack Obama (BarackObama)*
* I really need to add the 6th, because of its significance.
Ashton Kutcher eventually won the popularity contest by being the first to garner 1,000,000 Twitter followers. I was not surprised by the result. I expected Kutcher to win. If there had been more publicity before the whimsical challenge, I am sure Kutcher would have won with a wider margin. The web has given power to the people and no single entity (government, corporation, organization, media house) can beat the collective force generated by a huge number of people.
Interestingly, the mainstream media relies on social media to reach out to even more people in today’s world. CNN International is one global TV channel that has put social media and Web 2.0 applications to very good use through Facebook, Twitter, and their own iReport.com (relies on stories generated by users).
What is Twitter?
According to Wikipedia, Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or applications such as Tweetie, Twitterrific, Twitterfon, TweetDeck and feedalizr. The service is free to use over the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider fees.
The Guardian, one of the leading newspapers in the UK has a growing international readership online – a testament to the shift from traditioinal to new media. Beyond that, the Guardian is using new media (blogs, twitter and facebook) to lead a sustained and transparent dialogue about development work in Africa, using the Katine Project in Uganda (a collaboration with the African NGO Amref) as the driver.
@ Katine Editor, that is the right way to go. It is obvious CNN and the BBC understand that very well and that is why they use social media so judiously. Media houses in Ghana are deep in slumber. Most of their web presence are mediocre and even fewer run blogs. 🙄