The Talk of the Town

Social Media vs the ‘Grapevine’. Long before Facebook and Twitter, the grapevine was the way word spread. The power of the ‘grapevine’ is just as powerful today and just as fast as the Internet.

On Saturday, April 17th, Alternative Focus held a workshop in historical Pt Townsend, WA. The workshop was called, “How would Dick shoot this?” Using PT Townsend’s historical buildings as the backdrop and location; instructor Dick Garvey took our group of nine students/photographers on a tour of Pt Townsend. We visited four locations, already scoped out by the instructor, at each location Dick explained how he would photograph that location and why. Then he would give the students an assignment, which was to shoot the location based on their interpretation of how he would do it, then shoot that same location based on how they would do it. They were given up to one hour to complete the assignment.

Having nine photographers standing in one area with their cameras and tripods started to attract a lot of attention. Questions started circulating: What were we photographing? What was going on? Was this a workshop? Who were we with? People started to stop and photograph with us, others stopped to listen to the instructor and watch. This was as entertaining as the workshop.

By lunchtime we were the talk of the town. Word had spread that there was a large group of photographers photographing downtown. They were talking about us in the stores and coffee shops. In a very short time everyone was talking about us.

While photographing a series of old buildings a local passerby noticed us and took a photograph of us using her cell phone. She then emailed it to a friend, asking her friend “What am I missing?” Her friend then took the photograph and posted it to her Facebook, titling it, “What am I missing?” Thus spreading the news even further.

No longer were we just the talk of Pt Townsend, we were now the talk of somebody’s Facebook and her network of ‘friends’ and their ‘friend’.

Just goes to show how powerful these tools are and how fast they work. Too bad we didn’t get the name of the Facebook friend, it would be great to link to it.

Grapevine or Social Networking - useful tools for spreading the word.

Do we Tweet?

I followed a tweet from  ce_pro to a digital media content article where a Zobo.tv spokesman revealed that their  " client survey revealed that less than 10 percent had heard of digital content such as Rhapsody, Pandora, and Hulu. " And while it does beg the question 'who are their clients?'  that still seemed incredibly low. Only 10 percent were aware of the full range of video and audio possibilities on the interwebs? Could that be right?

So I got to thinking about new technologies, and how while we are rolling them out to our clients, we perhaps are not as adaptive to change as we expect them to be. How good are we at keeping up with technology outside our own narrow field? I decided to check out the new frontier of social media space and see how we as electronics professionals were doing in the adoption of the social media frenzy that has swept - well, social media. I started with Twitter.

I looked at a few of my favorite tradeshows and compared how many people they claim attended their latest trade show and how many people follow the parent group on Twitter. Here are the results:

Group                                  Twitter name       attendees       followers      Twitcentage*
Consumer Electronic Show         IntlCES            120,000           9,843              8.2%
InFocomm                                 InfoComm          30,000              843               2.8%
CEDIA                                       CEDIA               20,000              818              4.1%
NAMM                                       NAMM              13,000            1,808           13.91%

*I just made this up. I define it as the number of an entity's followers on Twitter divided by the entity's biggest exposure, in this case tradeshows.

Let's contrast our world with the larger one. Here are our Twitter stats stacked up against popular culture:

Pop Culture Icon/Current # of followers
Ashton Kutcher      4,463,303
Ellen Degeneres     4,193,971
Twitter                   2,936,264
Lady Gaga             2,580,692
Jimmy Fallon          2,467,780
Google                   2,123,872
The White House    1,697,058
Wolf Blitzer               345,402
MicroSoft                    54,883
Best Buy                     18,919
Sony Electronics           9,930
CES                             9,843
Control 4                       2,850
Crestron                        1,866
NAMM                          1,808
InfoComm                        843
CEDIA                             818

Word on the street is that Mr. Kutcher is the top Twitterdog, so he is our benchmark. Imagine your company with four million customers waiting to hear you tweet! Sweet!