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!