PR & The End of the Middle Class
There is longer a middle class on Twitter. Maybe there never was one. But over the past couple of years, a startling number stats pointing to a Twitter oligarchy have emerged. Here are a few:
Way back in 2007 TwitterFacts became the first blog to highlight this trend with their "Twitter distribution" series of grahics, each pointing to a long tail even in the rarified air of the then-top 500 users:
A couple years later Harvard Business Reveiw published another soon-to-be-viral graph, which showed that relative to other social networks, tweet density was concentrated among a prolific minority:
The same study added:
... The top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets.
So what does this all mean? For most people, it means they will get bored of not being heard, they will get frustrated by their inability to break through to the "in" crowd, and they will tweet less and less until their account is just an empty shell. They will resume their lives, already in progress. But for those whose career literally depends on their ability to escape Twitter's margins, the disappearance of a middle class is cause for concern. Some will follow-barter, some will succumb to the latest slight-of-hand technique, but most will just go away. Their careers will, quite literally, fade away.
I'd like to say the smart ones will wait patiently for the next tide to rise, and then be among the first to throw their board on the crest. But social networks are, by definition, all about interconnectivity. Celebrity, like anonymity, is instantly transferrable from one (social) medium to another.
So when "selling" ourselves -- whether interviewing for jobs or pitching new business -- what should we plebians do? First, we should invest time in earning our reputation and reach. We should resist any temptation to shortcircuit the system. Repeat after me: One follower at a time. We should also shift the discussion from a "raw numbers" arguement to a "relative value" discussion by pointing to tools such as TwitterGrader. Finally, we should remind the client (and ourselves) that PR still requires a variety of proficiencies, among which social media is but one.