Karrine Steffans Joins Twitter?

by Liz

July 9, 2008

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.

Category: Blogging, Celeb 2.0, Mobile, Social Networking, Strategy, Trends, social media, social media marketing, web 2.0 | Tags: Barack Obama, Friendfeed, Kanye West, Karina Pasian, Karrin Stephans, karrine, karrine steffans, Tavis Smiley, twitter

Suki Fuller

Liz, she brings no value to my Twitter stream also my life thus not following.

LaLaFuFu dotcom

She don't like to be called SUPERHEAD! But yeah she follows no one and all her tweets sound like google text ads. Nothing to see head people, move along...

Liz

@Suki, True she doesn't bring much value to my twitter stream either, but it's more about the people she brings with her. This could go for anyone who has a large following online. You may also not like the types of people she brings (if you assume you know who they are), but in general none of these sites are useful to others until they attain a critical mass of a VARIETY of people. Personally, I have found some new people I find interesting based off of just researching who follows her. Of course, she's just an example for the moment.

@LalaFuFu She could get her content game up, but that also assumes your method on how to use twitter is the right method. The beauty of Twitter is that you can use it many different ways.

Yasmin

To befriend Karrine/superhead or NOT...hmmm don't even need to think about it...hehe...but good blog about using celebrities to promote a site.

Fave

it's not about counting the people you reach, but reaching the people that count. Superhead's presence doesn't preserve the sexy of Twitter; instead, it's more of a marble of mediocrity splashing into the digital abyss. And I doubt if the ripples go far in the coming weeks.

funkdigital

Superhead's first post:
@whitneyhouston Whitney! Will u plz come over and get Bobby B. He's passed out on my couch again. I'm with Eddie Winslow now... u know, from Family Matters.

#2
@EddieWinslow Baby, I'm sorry I slept with Urkel. Forgive me.

Lynne d Johnson

For celebrity usage to really mean something (and hold value) on Twitter, they'll have to use it like the Zappos CEO does and the Jet Blue team -- to have real conversations with their customers (fans). If more celebrities did that -- then the site might become more mainstream.

BTW @Liz Burr -- welcome aboard. Nice first post.

Andy DeSoto

Pretty wild! I didn't know some of these individuals (even Superhead/Stephans) but this is a really interesting post with a more mainstream perspective (something I get less of every day, geez)!

Thanks for writing. =)

Roddykat

The "quality" of the celebrity is, I guess, the answer to the question of when Twitter goes Nova. plus, there may be more actual celebs on it that we even know of. The ones that are probably are using it as suggested. as a means of promotion. Look at the ones, that are known (possibly Kayne aside). Snoop Dogg, Hammer, Obama, Superhead. Maybe there are some celeb geeks who use it, but prefer not to promote themselves.