By PHIL PALIOS
What is Twitter for? Why should I care what you’re doing with your boring life? While many people use Twitter to make their otherwise dull lives seem more interesting, I recently discovered that Twitter has created a new form of communication that allows open conversation with people you never imagined to be possible. The process is simple: you see a celebrity or someone you find interesting, you find their Twitter account, you can talk to them. I’m kidding, right? No. I have experienced this phenomenon first-hand and think it’s something worth sharing.
Twitter is only the medium for this type of communication, it’s people like James Clark (@JamesProps, on-set propmaster), Greg Grunberg (@GregGrunberg, Matt Parkman), Wendi Lynn Allison (@WendiLynnMakeup, key makeup artist) and Brea Grant (@BreaGrant, Daphne Millbrook) from the cast and crew of Heroes that make Twitter worth using. Don’t be turned off by the “reading a book.” and “having dinner.” updates that your friends throw up into the twitterverse, there are a plethora of celebrities and people on the “inside” of your favorite movies, TV shows, books, software companies and more that have opened up a window into their world for everyone to take a peek. Not only can you get a real, unedited look at what goes on in the making of a show like Heroes, you can actively join in conversations with these people. Why is this valuable? If used correctly, it can lead you places and create real opportunities that were never before possible.
An example of such an opportunity is behind the creation of Greg Grunberg’s iPhone application “Yowza!!” which he created by finding a developer and a designer among his followers on Twitter. The application, offering discount coupons to retailers near wherever you happen to be, has launched with great success. A personal example for me was when Charlie Lieberman (@cldp), one of the Directors of Photography on Heroes joined Twitter and I sent him a message indicating my admiration of his work and interest in the industry. In the Pre-Twitter days, being able to contact someone like Charlie for someone like me would have been nearly impossible. If I was lucky enough to find his e-mail address on the web, or his agency contact info and send him a message, the conversation would die there, as my message would have gone into a black hole. But thanks to how easy Twitter makes communication and its limit of messages to 140 characters, I got a response back from Charlie!
Wendi Lynn Allison, key makeup artist on Heroes (@WendiLynnMakeup)
My conversation with the Heroes DP started on Twitter and moved to e-mail where I received advice that I treasure and have used in progressing my career. I would have paid lots and lots of money for this opportunity, but I didn’t have to, the combination of Twitter’s free service and Charlie donating his time to take advantage of it made this happen for $0. This brings me to my second point about Twitter: creating an experience like what I have described is valuable. At the time of writing this article, Twitter is a money sink funded by “angel” investors who pour their money into the service without requiring a business plan or anything like that. At some point the joy ride will end, Twitter needs to find a way to sustain and not depend on donations from investors for its continued operation.
The founders of Twitter have repeatedly said they are investigating options for revenue and would like to stay away from advertising. If they aren’t going the ad route, I think that the way Twitter enables users to communicate with people they might never have had the chance to otherwise is where they could make money. The idea being that users would have to pay a small fee to send a message to people with a celebrity status. I won’t dig into how someone being a celebrity is determined, but I recognize that is one of the challenges faced when taking this approach. Let’s say the fee is 49 cents per message, comparable to a postage stamp. This is a fee I would not have a problem paying for the ability to ask a celebrity a question.
James Clark, on-set propmaster for Heroes (@JamesProps)
However, this model brings up some issues that only the celebrities can answer: Would celebrities still use the service if it were monetized like this? Is part of their reason for using it now the fact that there is no middle-man, there is no one making a profit off of their contribution to the community? Or, if the fee were shared (perhaps split) between Twitter and the celebrity, would this encourage them to continue using the service? Perhaps it could even attract celebrities that didn’t use the service before to start using it?
There is one more problem: When you send one of these celebrities a message, there is no guarantee you will receive a response. In fact, given the thousands of questions sent into all of these celebrities, I may be among the lucky few to have received a response to my question. Despite the fact that you may not receive a response, it could still be worth sending a message because of how low the cost is. Celebrity users could also be rated with their response rate, so you know what to expect before you try sending a message.
This model would still allow you to read all of the updates, and even the questions and responses for all of the celebrities using Twitter. This free ability isn’t to be discounted, there has been some real juicy content posted by celebrities. For example, James Clark has posted photos with some “behind the scenes” looks at the Heroes set and Wendi Lynn Allison has posted dozens of photos with various stars of the show while they are having their makeup done. Following these cast and crew members allows you to have a real-time sense of what’s going on as they film the show, way better than most Behind the Scenes footage on a DVD, and you don’t even have to buy the DVD!
Just for suggesting that Twitter “sell out” and “join the man” I know I will receive a lot of negative feedback. But, the plain and simple truth is that if Twitter doesn’t find a way to pay for its bandwidth, memory and processing costs as well as taking care of the developers and support staff that create it, Twitter will cease to exist. If Twitter goes away a new Twitter may emerge and ride the angel investments for a while, but, it too will fade without becoming profitable and eventually angel investors will stop investing in the idea. Even angel investors want to make money at some point.
If Twitter took advantage of this value I have described and began charging a small fee for certain interactions I think they would have a strong possibility of becoming profitable and stick around. I also think that this celebrity phenomenon would grow and help a lot of people make connections that they never thought possible. What do you think?
I think Twitter can’t be a monetary site, and avoid the adds would be great. People should makes donations to able the service go on, just that.
I so wanted to write a blog like this. Mine is more obscure and not read. Thank you for acknowledging the cast and crew of Heroes for being so open with the fans. We love them like friends we haven’t met yet.
Bravo, bravo, bravo! Great post!
I became a ‘Heroes’ fan late in the game. My wife and I have been watching the box sets to catch up to the current season. When we saw Eric “The Puppetmaster” Doyle, we both were amazed at what a great actor he was. Totally creepy.
As these things tend to happen, I was reading “Twitter Power” by Joel Comm the next week and saw him mention that a friend of his who he described as a “rising actor” had started using Twitter and was gaining quite a following.
The actor? David Lawrence XVII. The puppetmaster. (He’s @dhlawrencexvii )
Anyway, a few tweets and emails later and I wound up having a wonderful conversation and we’ve got some plans to do some work together in 2010 that involves him using his incredible voice in some of our audio projects.
And, as your article points out — it would have been nearly impossible 5 years ago to have had that kind of one-on-one dialogue with a Hollywood celebrity. Sure, I could’ve gone through his agency and tried to get past all the gatekeepers who are trained to weed out the weirdos. (And they’re performing a valuable service, too).
But it was great to connect with David in a very simple and direct way.
Twitter rocks. And so does ‘Heroes’.