Today is truly the first day of the rest of our lives. Oprah is on Twitter. From what we can see, three hours in, Oprah is being enthusiastically welcomed as a member of the family; she is attracting 30-40 new followers every five seconds.
Our morning staff meeting was filled with lots of discussion and some initial questions:
Will this first day of the rest of our lives be the start of a whole new world? (Clichés and redundancy intended – literary license.) Are Oprah’s +100,000 followers now a marketer’s most coveted and aggressively-pursued target list?
What new Twitter-related applications can we expect? Someone somewhere is surely hustling this morning to create a Twitter client that tracks or monitors Oprah’s twittering. See above.
Are we all going to see the Fail Whale much more frequently? How many of Oprah’s followers are new to the game because of her?
Is the “uproar” over ghost-Twitters unjustified? Assuming that Oprah’s “people” are helping her out… why is it ok for any celebrity or CEO to have people writing their commencement addresses and speeches but not their tweets?