Politicians: Twittering Their Way to Fame

It might have something to do with Obama’s success in utilizing different channels of social media tools. During last General Election, Indonesian politicians–especially the presidential candidates, were eager to hold casual dialogue with bloggers; and even formed their own social media team to twitter away.

Brands: The Trend of Creating Fictitious Characters

Lately, Indonesian brands were crazy over inventing “fictitious characters” for their marketing campaigns. Brands perceived it as an easy way to create buzz over the Net–as an answer to the rapid development of social media usage in Indonesia. Even Citra Pariwara, the most prestigious awarding event in the country’s advertising industry, launched a new category this year, called “Daun Muda Award”. They challenged advertising people to create “fictitious character” and nurture it in such a way to generate buzz from social media users.

However, brands should come up with a solid and integrated communications strategy if they’d like to use this approach for their marketing campaigns. Some brands have failed miserably when trying to adopt this strategy. A production house for a horror movie The Real Pocong, for instance, got lots of criticism for spreading a ‘viral’ about a missing little girl named Laura. The public were angry when they found out that the missing little girl was a made-up; a “fictitious character” created for promoting the movie.

TweetLevel: Curious Result on ‘Influence Rating’

Edelman recently launched the beta version of TweetLevel, a tool to measure an individual’s importance on Twitter.

This tool is still in beta. Even though we believe that it goes a great way to understand and quantify the varying importance of different people’s usage of Twitter, by no means whatsoever do we believe we have fully solved the ‘influence’ problem. What we would appreciate is your views, your feedback, advice and criticism is crucial in helping us understand social media measurement. (TweetLevel’s site)

I tried to measure my influence rating on Twitter, and came up with a very curious result. According to TweetLevel, I (@beradadisini) am more influential than Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) the founder of WordPress.

I guess TweetLevel still has a long way to go…