I’m watching in real-time as Conan O’Brien’s (aka “Coco”) fans take over
Twitter, Facebook & other Social Media channels.
Will advertisers and the network executives listen to the social masses?
First of all, in full disclosure, I’m a HUGE Conan fan myself. Yesterday afternoon I changed my personal Facebook photo to my own tacky tribute to Conan and Andy and I started tweeting out my dissatisfaction at NBC and cheered Conan’s classy statement.
As of 5:05pm EST on 01/13/10, a protest “I’m With Coco” Facebook Fan Page is averaging 135 new members PER MINUTE. That’s over 5363 new fans during the time it took me to write a blog post. 27,758 and counting. The beautiful image on the right is being shared in a sign of solidarity.
UPDATE 01/14/10: 107,698 fans at 5:28pm EST
UPDATE 01/18/10: 357,586 fans at 10:33pm EST
In contrast, the NBC fan page has 11,492 fans.
Yesterday and today, “Team Conan“ was trending on Twitter. Multiple “Twitter Ribbons” added a badge to their profile picture and tweeted out support messages. I have to wonder if the Twitter Tracker bird is going to blow up these tweets, or if it will finally be happy.
Online polls show support for Conan at over 80%, while 88% support a move to Fox. Petitions allowed users to pledge their support.
Team Jay does not seem to be making much of an impact. Maybe that’s because his audience tends to be older. This is also an important point, because which target audience is more important to advertisers? It’s been reported that Conan’s audience is 11 years younger than Letterman’s, and obviously more vocal on Social Media.
In a time when people BUY due to personal recommendations, this shows Conan’s audience has great influence on their friends.
How else could these topics trended so quickly if people were not responding to their friend’s actions? This audience doesn’t just respond to a TV ad, they respond to the brand and feeling of a product, person or network. And right now, the feeling about the peacock is pretty terrible. The impact on NBC is going to linger around a lot longer than viewers during a 1 hour show.
The question remains, are the advertisers and network executives listening?
From a business standpoint, this whole thing started because of lack of eyeballs and adverstising money. People are watching now. I’m wondering if the large corporate machine behind all of this was prepared for this sort of protest. Are they listening or even prepared to rise up? If not, then who are they making programming choices for? Who does they think spends money with their advertisers?
Personally, I hope they listen, because I can’t imagine late night without “In the Year 3000“, Pierre Bernard Jr’s “Recliner of Rage” and Conan’s string dance.
Go Team Coco!
Stay tuned… I’ll address the branding impact of all of this in another post. Right now, I’m too excited watching the protests unfold.
Please share your thoughts!
About Virtuallinda (Linda Schenk)
This morning, I'm With Coco is up to 78,934 fans. I, too, am watching this with hopeful anticipation that it will wake up the advertisers and NBC bigwigs. At the same time, I'm hopeful Conan takes his audience to FOX. They will welcome him, his staff, and all of his audience with very open arms!