Who’s Smarter: Dane Cook or Newsweek?

December 12, 2009

en-US

by Craig Fifield – follow him on Twitter @CraigFifield

The other night just as I was done finishing up on Twitter @DannySullivan dropped a link to a Newsweek story and said:

gosh, change “twitter” to “blogs” in dan lyons rip on twitter & it could be 2004

Sullivan is usually spot on so with cold beer in hand and Xbox calling to me from the other room I reluctantly clicked through and started reading Don’t Tweet on Me by Daniel Lyons.

In it Mr. Lyons has many insightful thoughts on Twitter that got me going –

Twitter has become a playground for imbeciles

most of what streams across Twitter is junk

The genius of Twitter is that it manages to be even stupider than TV

forget all the stuff you’ve heard from bloviating Web gurus about Twitter being useful

While those quotes are juicy and begging me to bloviate all over them there’s only so much time in a guru’s day so I thought I’d focus on the one that hit closest to home — branding via Twitter.

Dane Cook tweets a lot of crap.

One of the major points Lyons makes is that @DaneCook is hurting his brand by Tweeting.

Dane Cook apparently believes he is building his brand by pumping out a steady stream of comments on Twitter

Cook’s comments are so lame and unfunny that what he’s actually doing is revealing, multiple times a day, how little talent he has

I’ll give credit where credit is do and admit Lyons is correct, Dane Cook is not funny (sorry, but you knew that was coming!)

But hurting his brand? Wow.

Lyons is really missing it on this one so I thought I should clarify.

Based on his statements I can only assume he is thinking of Dane’s brand in old school terms and thinks the act is Dane’s brand. Its not, he is the brand his act is only a piece of that.

Or to put that another way — his act is a tool (see what I did there?). It’s his main tool but it is still just a tool he uses to build the brand of Dane.

There are comedians that try to protect ‘the act’.

And where are they?
We still have other comedians out there somewhere, right?

If Dane was focused on protecting his act on Twitter he wouldn’t be nearly as successful. All he would share would be jokes we’ve all heard or stuff that had been tested and polished. Or nothing at all. Boring.

The people that follow Dane on Twitter do so because they like him enough that they want to get to know him better. That is what Dane is doing with his drivel – building his brand by getting closer to his audience. As Lyons put it “lame jokes”, “pointless babble” and all.

In fact, all that lame stuff is exactly what his fans want. They want him to tweet the bad jokes, what he ate, what he thinks of Newsweek, etc, etc — that is the real Dane.

The more he tweets the stronger his brand becomes.

Dane is a smart twit because he knows that communicating with his audience, getting to know them, and most importantly letting them know him is where the magic happens.

He is what people want on Twitter, not his “material”.
He is the brand, not his act.

What Dane has built by giving himself to the audience in this way is much more powerful than a comedy act. He’s built a serious brand and his tweets played a large role.

How about them cookies?

Quotes from Lyons’ own story prove how powerful this type of Twittering can be:

Kutcher has 3.5 million Twitter followers, and Simpson has 1.5 million (Dane has 1.3m)

they’ve built bigger audiences than a lot of TV shows.

Exactly.

Mr. Lyons might not like what they are tweeting but their fans clearly do.

What’s more important is that they’ve built their own audiences that they own (not some network) much of which is due to them tweeting a lot of “pointless” stuff on Twitter.

As long as they stay true to their audience in their tweets they don’t need TV, Movies, or comedy shows anymore — they could all bake cookies and still be successful.