Why It’s Stupid to Pay Kim Kardashian $10k for a Tweet | Hacker News Reader

Why It’s Stupid to Pay Kim Kardashian $10k for a Tweet

thefastertimes.com

14 pointsdreambird12 comments

This resonated with me: "Is there more influence in the tail than in the head? If you talk to 100k people who talk to 10 people each, do you get more bang than talking to one person who has 1m followers?"

And I'd say the answer is emphatically yes. I'm far more likely to listen to the opinions of friends and family (especially knowledgeable ones) than a celebrity whose celebrity is derived solely from being a celebrity.

I've actually been building a product over the last month that taps into these sort of long-tail recommendations, which I hope to launch as soon as this weekend. We'll see if it proves more valuable to its users than a $10,000 tweet from Kim Kardashian, but I'd be shocked if the answer wasn't "yes."

He asked - hypothetically, thank God - whether it would be worth it to pay Kim Kardashian $10k for a tweet to her alleged 3.27 million followers. He found that targeting instead lots of people who have far fewer followers would yield “much, much higher ROI.”

Perhaps, but it'd likely a lot more expensive to boot. I have a 1000th of Kardashian's audience (3000 followers) and I wouldn't run a paid tweet for $10 (nor would I doubt most similarly endowed tweeters).. $100 would probably get the ball rolling :-) There's actually more to lose with a smaller following.

Your followers are each worth a lot more than Kardashian's though. Celebrities and people on Twitter's recommended list are going to have much lower-value followers by a lot.

But the real problem here is the value proposition of Twitter is that you are getting genuine information from an individual or entity you care about. This is why Twitter is great for individuals and good for corporate PR/marketing, but it falls apart the minute you have sponsored tweets. This not only hurts the individual accepting payola but it also hurts Twitter as a whole as the "others" over time come to associate it with just another annoying marketing medium.

It's probably possible for some celebrities to skillfully walk the line and extra some fair value out it like product placement in television shows, but I think the opportunities are pretty limited.

On a semi related note, Jeff Jarvis book What would Google do? put me off pretty much anything else he ever had to say in about 2 or 3 chapters.

Why?

Full of buzz words and repeated points using the word Google about 5 times a page. It seemed like he'd landed a big book contract, which he described in the book despite claiming old style media was dead, then come up with the specifics of the book later.

What's funny here is that he says that he wouldn't follow a Kim Kardashian tweet, but he would follow a Clay Shirky one, therefore the ROI is lower with her.

What he seems to miss is that people who _do_ care about her celebrity enough to follow her will probably get a better ROI from following her links than they would from following a Clay Shirky one - because they have different tastes and interests to him.

Its important to consider not only how many people follow a certain person but also how much sway he has with each his followers. In Twitter's environment to measure this one can look at how often his messages get re-twitted, in Facebook its how many replies or likes he usually gets.

From my experience, good content will be re-tweeted by people (whatever the person). A friend of mine has less than 1K followers, but gets sometimes 30K hits from Twitter (that's 4 months ago). I know another guy with 200K follower but his website doesn't seem to get traction.

I am going to google it after posting but I have to say I have no idea who this person is.

I am sure after reading the wikipedia entry I will weep for my loss of innocence on this subject.

amusing that the title element is

<title>Kim Kardashian, Twitter: Why you should pay Kim Kardashian $10k for a Tweet | Media and Tech</title>

Does this even need explaining?

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