Karrine Steffans Joins Twitter?

Just when you thought Twitter was falling off due to its technical difficulties, Twitter gets a new kid on the block: Karrine Steffans.

Karrine Steffans recently joined Twitter, and instead of quietly setting up an account, it appears as though she executed a pub stint by announcing her Twitter membership on her website. I suspect she also posted a bulletin to her MySpace fans, and today I learned that she sent this message to her e-mail list:

It’s been a while since you all have heard from me. I’ve noticed everyone has been blogging and video blogging all over the place and it made me want to find a newer, faster, more fun way of communicating with all of you. So, I decided to invite all of you to Twitter! This way, you will receive updates throughout the week, most every day, right to your mobile phone or computers.

To join:
Go to http://www.twitter.com/KarrineSteffans
Click the RSS feed button or
Use your own Twitter account and become a follower of my posts.
It’s that simple.

See you on Twitter!
Karrine

Say what you will about Karrine, but I give her credit for thinking outside of the celebrity (?) PR box to find new ways to interact with her fans. While I doubt she has a massive PR team working hard for her personal brand online, I respect her attempt at interacting with fans via MySpace, her hilarious (but now M.I.A.)  video blogs, and now—Twitter. What’s next? UStream? Friendfeed?

In her first three days on Twitter (and roughly 10-12 updates), Karrine has amassed 160+ followers, most of whom follow one user (Karrine) and are still exploring the service. I think it’s safe to conclude that her presence is bringing new users to Twitter, albeit in very small numbers. Kanye West has been using Twitter for some time now (apparently he is the person doing the Twittering), so imagine what could happen if he posted an entry about Twitter on his wildly popular blog and asked his fans to join?

Does this mean Twitter is truly hitting the bigtime? Karrine alone can’t make Twitter mainstream, but as more non-geeks join these Web 2.0 services, the more likely they’ll hit a tipping point a la MySpace. My first few years on MySpace were quite lonely and useless because I had to wait for critical mass to arrive.  I like Friendfeed as a service, but honestly, it’s currently a place for geeks. I know enough about geeks already (I am one, thankyouverymuch), I’ll be more interested in Friendfeed when more of my real life friends start using the site.

Of course it’s not enough for a celebrity to sign up for a social media site, but they must actually use it, embrace it, and send their fans to it. While Barack Obama is one of the top followed users on Twitter, rarely do I ever hear his campaign push its constituents to receive updates using the service. It’s always a one way pull to get people already on Twitter to follow him, rather than get non-users to sign up and follow him.

Clearly Barack and Kanye don’t need to push a membership drive for Twitter, but in the interest of the countless arguments for getting a Web 2.0 site to go mainstream, it will take numerous high profile users (i.e. real celebrities) to jump on board, actually use the service and encourage their digerati (i.e. regular people online) to migrate over as well. Sorry, Kevin Rose is not going to cut it.

Notable Twitterers of Color:
Barack Obama
Kanye West
Karrine Steffans
Denzel Washington
Tavis Smiley
Karina Pasian

You can catch me twittering here, and of course Black Web 2.0 can be found here.