Sizzle
In a world where toasters have AI and rabbits have wheels, did Twitter regain its relevance?
A few days ago, we lived in a world where we hadn’t heard about a $3500 AI-powered steak toaster. Now, we can’t imagine our artificially infused intelligent kitchen without one. That was before CES — the world’s great tech swap meet. I wrote that Twitter needed a big CES to show advertisers the platform is still relevant. It’s time to check the tape. Or, whatever AI people use now to check things they recorded.
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If you came to Twitter the past few days, they made sure you saw the CES feed. CES was promoted everywhere. What you didn’t see were any ads. None. Not one. Not on desktop. Not on mobile. Not nowhere. This could be that they couldn’t pre-sell it at a price they liked. Or the quality of ads on Twitter these days is embarrassing. And, they decided not to show them.
Their algo locked in on several big companies, including: LG, Intel, Mercedes, NVIDA, Siemens, SONY, and Walmart. And, three hand-picked tech people who wandered around: iJustine, Liz Claman, and Brian Tong.
I think Twitter pre-selected who the feed would feature. I say this as someone who poured over the code that powers Twitter’s algo when Musk released it last year. It’s not like the algo missed many of the major posts. Periodically, I checked for outliers and found only two.
Let’s start there. Because they’re hilarious.
Tim Cook punked Elon Musk. Apple won’t advertise and they don’t post. But Tim announced his new product here.
It was like he channeled Bill Murray’s character from Caddyshack, “There won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.”
So, I guess Elon’s got that going for him. Which is nice.
Cook’s post got 5M views. That’s about 50x to 100x more than the posts from the LG’s of the world.
The next great story was a little company called Rabbit Tech. They raised $20M in October to make anything that could be stamped AI. To me, it’s AI recycling. Their orange box is a push-to-talk 2003 Sprint walkie-talkie with a thumbwheel from a leftover Blackberry. If you figure out why I should care, LMK.
The fledgling company has 43K followers on Twitter. Their 10-minute Key Note video post got 9.5K likes, 1K replies, 4K reposts and a whopping 8.3M views.
They posted the same thing on LinkedIn where they have 3K followers. The comps were: 142, 6, and 53. No, I didn’t forget the Ks.
LinkedIn doesn’t show view counts. But YouTube does. Rabbit picked up 240K views for that video on the world’s most-watched video platform.
The same ratios held for reporters who posted the stories to Twitter and LinkedIn. Marty Swant, for example, from Digiday.
Those are numbers Linda Yaccarino can use to tell a story.
You’re not going to read this anywhere else. Major outlets won’t have bothered to look at any numbers. In fact, during CES, Elon talked about making Twitter video-first and lauded tech journalist Kara Swisher dunked on Musk.
“Yeah Instagram and TikTok and Reddit and YouTube would like a word. Running headlong into a slew of superb rivals with stellar track records and genuine and engaged audience already tells me all I need to know about the media expertise at work here.”
Then, I remembered, social is not about boring, locked-down, corporate-speak posts. It’s not about experts. It’s about folks doing the unexpected. Tim Cook, Rabbit Tech, and this…
A rom-com called Anyone But You. This week, the movie critics panned it. Giving it a 51% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Empire said it was, “Lacking in both romance and comedy.” The Guardian called it, “Soulless.” The studio (SONY) thought the movie might do $20M in box office.
The social buzz got it an 87% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It will likely triple what SONY thought it would make.
Can Linda Yaccarino sell social sizzle to a $3500 AI-powered steak toaster?
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