Posts Tagged ‘shaq’
The Shaq Effect: Just how influential is the Big Cactus?
So…the Oprah Effect. You’ve heard of it. How much she – and other celebrities - are affecting the social media realm. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing can be discussed in other places, but one thing’s for sure…it’s definitely a “thing” and it should not be ignored.
Take, for example, “The Shaq Effect.” The argument could be made, in fact, that the Shaq Effect served as the precursor to the Oprah Effect. His engagement with fans via Twitter and his Facebook Fan Page led to all kinds of buzz and excitement as his follower numbers skyrocketed and he enjoyed interacting with his adoring public.
But how can you really measure something like The Shaq Effect? Sure you could use detailed metrics of Twitter number increases and Fan Page fan statistics, but that’s way too boring and scientific. We’re going to go with something way cooler and more fun: screen shots and videos. Hooray!
Here’s the situation: At 10:40 p.m. CT, on the night of Tuesday, June 23rd, Shaq tweeted this:
The video he’s tweeting about can be seen below. As the screen shot shows, it had about 340 views at the time of the tweet. That’s not bad. (Screenshot first, then video below that)
(Here’s the video itself…)
Being the studious and curious thinker I am, I made a point to check back in at exactly 10:40 this morning. Here’s the number of views, exactly 12 hours after Shaq’s tweet:
And now, as of the time that this post was created, the view numbers are almost 35,000.
So…did the numbers spike so rapidly due to the video itself simply being awesome, or is it the fact that Shaq’s network of 1,372,200 people (at the time) rushed to view a video that inspired Shaq to want to play a guy in a game of horse for $1,000 (many of whom probably then shared it with THEIR networks)? Bearing in mind that the video had been posted since June 11 and only had 340 views in almost 2 weeks, I’m guessing Shaq had a bit to do with the view number increase of over 5,000% in a 12-hour span. Obviously there’s more to this equation than page view numbers in the bottom corner of a YouTube screen, but this was simply meant to be an observation that happened to morph into a blog post.
Our question is this – Could any Twitter celebrity have made that happen or is it the sheer numbers behind the army of Shaq Twitter followers that made it happen? If Gary Vaynerchuk had thrown it out there to his 566,000+ followers, would the video views still have jumped to 20,000? If Chris Brogan had shared it with his almost 80,000 followers would his followers (and their networks) have gotten the video 20,000 views? On the flip side, would Ellen DeGeneres’s network of 2,100,000+ followers have taken the video to 40,000 views?
Or would simply landing on the front page of Digg have been all it needed to get there? Are you at all surprised that Shaq’s network didn’t get the video MORE than 20,000 views?
All of these many questions are questions that we’re currently debating in the office, so we figured we’d see what you have to say. We’d love to hear your thoughts, so fill us in on your views in the comments section below or on Twitter at @deepbench.
P.S. – We’d love to hear your favorite Shaqalicious nickname while you’re at it, so let us know. Big Cactus, Big Diesel, Big Jabberwocky, Big Aristotle (my personal favorite) or one of the dozens of others?
UPDATE: As of a few hours after we posted this highly detailed analysis (around 6:00 on June 24th), it appears Shaq has been traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers. According to TechCrunch, it’s possible he found out about this trade via Twitter. On a side note, it is this writer’s fear that, when Shaq gets to Cleveland, the potential combination of his HUGE personality combined with LeBron James’ equally outgoing personality could cause the entire city of Cleveland to explode from a fun, passion, and excitement overload. Things could get crazy, folks.
Box Scores: April 13-19 – Internet buzz and more!
With this glorious Monday comes your weekly Deep Bench Box Scores. If you hadn’t heard or noticed, the online community was more or less consumed with a downpour of “sensational” news stories that made the internet seem like a never-ending issue of US Weekly. Whether it was Susan Boyle’s lesson in not judging books by their covers, CNN and Ashton Kutcher’s race to a million Twitter followers, Oprah’s recent joining of Twitter, or Domino’s Pizza’s unfortunate predicament, the web was abuzz with a plethora of news to focus on.
Luckily, we weathered that storm and came up with a few posts we felt were worth sharing from last week…
Chris Brogan kicks things off for us this week with an (as usual) insightful post on how to learn from life’s experiences rather than simply experience life’s experiences. He pretty much sums it up in this (worth-repeating out loud) quote: “If you can break out the concepts from the content, the entire kingdom becomes yours.” It’s not what you see or read…it’s what you learn by paying attention beyond your initial impression or schemas.
-“Finding Your Social Media Purple Cow”
This Mashable post from Darren Barefoot (yeah…sweet last name for sure) covers how to have fun while doing good work in social media. Although the tips seem obvious (e.g. “Bring the funny,” “Give it away,” and “Add mystery”), they are all tips worth remembering and utilizing in the future when coming up with promotional or game-changing concepts in the marketing and advertising industry.
-“The hierarchy of presentations”
Seth Godin brings his always short and to-the-point insight to those of us preparing presentations for future clients (or for any other people, really). Certainly wouldn’t be hard to adopt this mindset when gathering thoughts for your next client meeting or conference speaking engagement. Or just for practice in general.
-“Can social media make us buy more cars?”
Mashable weighs in with their take on one of our favorite social media discussion topics as of late – Ford’s Fiesta Movement. Will Ford’s dive into social media help them sell more cars? We won’t know until the movement is under way, but we can think of one Fiesta Agent (who happens to be the Team President of Deep Bench) who is pretty excited. If that excitement is at all as contagious as it seems to be, then Ford can expect to get a positive response from the Fiesta Movement (and probably sell quite a few cars along the way).
-“Oprah gets pwned by Shaq on Twitter”
While Oprah rarely does wrong in the eyes of her adoring fans, Twitter did help prove that she can make a mistake every once in awhile too. And who better to point out Oprah’s mistake than the Big Cactus himself? Guess this just goes to show that even the most revered media personalities should have some form of strategy in place before jumping into a new medium like Twitter. Thanks for helping us prove our point, @THE_REAL_SHAQ.
-“A BIG thanks to our deep bench…”
Finally, we’d like to throw out another mention of the help we got from some friends of Deep Bench that came through for us in a huge way last Friday. Read the post to see what we mean, but the bottom line is this: we’ve been fortunate to align ourselves with some energetic and excited young people who exemplify the Deep Bench mantra of “Work. Play. Do Good.” Just goes to show that the best bench truly is a deep bench.
And so concludes this week’s Box Scores. Hopefully this upcoming week will carry as much excitement as last week unleashed. Speaking of last week, was there anything important we missed and should have included? Were you particularly pleased with this week’s Box Scores selection? If your answer for either of those questions was “Yes,” then let us know in the comments section below. Whether Box Scores rocked your socks off or seemed to be missing a key article or blog post you enjoyed, give us your feedback and let us know.
Now…let’s go out and have ourselves a great Monday! Readyyy, break!