The blog world has been atwitter today about Ashton Kutcher and CNN's race to amass a million followers on twitter (Kutcher won late Friday night). Witty repartee on the topic is rampant on twitter, many tweets with links to blog entries on the ins and outs of social media; Oprah's twitter account; who follows who on twitter; how many people one should follow; who gets twitter and who doesn't. It goes on and on.
Opinions vary and admittedly I've got an unbalance in my follower ratio and am constantly beating myself up over it. I'd like to engage in conversation with everyone - but honestly there's not enough of me to handle it. My answer is to try to make up for the imbalance by answering those who send @ messages (tweet a message with @susanreynolds in the text).
Fine, so this may not be something Ashton can manage since he's got a million followers to my couple of thousand . . BUT CNN can. No matter what their following numbers are at they've got staff who can interact with those of us who try to engage them.
The question is whether they, or any of the other traditional media - old media - chose to have a conversation. Is that concept even on their radar much less their priority list?
Unlike Ford who hired Scott Monty to help bring them into the world of interactive media in a way that's fun, informative and personal, CNN chooses to go the way of politicians, celebrities, and other big names who use twitter as a broadcast medium rather than as a way to engage us.
Dialogue? I don't think so. Be prepared to be broadcasted to.
