Twitter Visits Surpass New York Times and Wall Street Journal
By Brian Solis, blogger at PR 2.0 and principal of FutureWorks PR, Co-Author Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and Now Is Gone
The race to 1,000,000 followers between Ashton Kutcher and CNN followed shortly thereafter by the Oprah Effect and the ensuing celebrity stampede has propelled Twitter beyond two of the world's most prominent media brands.
According to Compete and Quantcast, as documented byPaidContent, Twitter.com soared past the online properties of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
The truth is stranger than fiction...but it is reality.
I believe that Twitter will only continue to distance itself from other top media brands as it continues to seduce new users into the "conversation," facilitating the cultivation of human networks and transforming them into concentric communities that offer a semblance of micro fame, celebrity and authority.
Why?
(cc) Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com - Twitter, @briansolis
Twitter and other online lifestreams and timelines such as FriendFeed, Facebook, Chi.mp, and Tumblr, are rapidly evolving into individual attention dashboards, luring us away from bookmarks and RSS feeds in order to discover and share relevant content and updates.
Timelines and News Feeds serve as our centralized attention dashboard and determine what we read, what we say, and who responds simply by the information that continually flows through it. We’re engaged at the point and place of introduction and bound by context and time. Noticeable content sparks curiosity and dictates our next move and subsequently the next moves and reactions of friends and friends of friends (FoFs).
These dashboards are our source of influence, intelligence, entrainment, connections, and distractions. They will only grow more prominent as they adapt to our behavior.
Welcome to the Statusphere...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 movement and response. 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.
Twitter is however, an opportunity for any media property to connect content to those seeking relevant information. The new era of distribution migrates away from home delivery and assumed destination models and instead proactively distributes stories to individuals where their attention and that of their social graph is fixed. I explore the subject deeper in, "Can the Statusphere Save Journalism." Update: What's holding our attention on Twitter right now? Click here to find out.
(cc) Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com - Twitter, @briansolis
Brian Solis is globally recognized for his views and insights on the convergence of PR, Traditional Media and Social Media. He actively contributes his thoughts and experiences through speaking appearances, books, articles and essays as a way of helping the marketing industry understand and embrace the new dynamics fueling new communications, marketing, and content creation. Solis is Principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning PR agency in Silicon Valley. Solis blogs at PR2.0, bub.blicio.us, TechCrunch, and BrandWeek. Solis is co-founder of the Social Media Club and is a founding member of the Media 2.0 Workgroup. Solis has been actively writing about new PR since the mid 90s to discuss how the Web was redefining the communications industry – he coined PR 2.0 along the way. Solis is considered an expert in traditional PR, media relations, and Social Media. He has dedicated his free time to helping PR professionals adapt to the new fusion of PR, Web marketing, and community relations. PR 2.0 has earned a position of authority in the Technorati blog directory and currently resides in the top 1.5% of indexed blogs. BrianSolis.com is also ranked among the most influential blogs in the Ad Age Power 150 listing of leading marketing bloggers. Working with Geoff Livingston, Solis was co-author of “Now is Gone,” a new book that helps businesses learn how to engage in Social Media. He has also written several ebooks on the subjects of Social Media, New PR, and Blogger Relations. His next book, co-authored with Deirdre Breakenridge, “Putting the Public back in Public Relations,” is now available from FT press. Connect with Solis on: Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Social Median, or Facebook --Subscribe to the PR 2.0 RSS Feed
(cc) Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com - Twitter, @briansolis