Mid-Oscars, host Ellen DeGeneres says she’s going to tweet a “selfie” – self portrait – and asks audience members to jump in the photo. Now, it happened that the audience around her jumping in were A-listers that included Jared Leto, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Bradley Cooper, Brad Pitt, Kevin Spacey and Angelina Jolie…
But she also vowed to set a record for most retweets, to beat the previous set by @BarackObama when he won re-election in 2012 (captioned simply, “Four more years”). Ellen handed the camera to Bradley Cooper, then captioned the tweet as shown above, with a “best photo ever” and including the hashtag #oscars.
It might’ve also been the best Twitter lesson ever. Ellen’s tweet received over a million retweets in under an hour; it’s now over two and a half million and counting. Twitter experienced a 25-minute slowdown and a full shutdown for some users as the selfie quickly broke the record. “We crashed and broke Twitter,” DeGeneres said later from the stage. “We made history.”
Naturally, we participated in and enjoyed the phenomenon as much as the next sheared sheep, but with a keen eye to what made THIS tweet stand out, and what takeaways our authors might enjoy from Ellen’s spectacular Twitter lesson. First of course there’s the obvious:
- Duh, it’s the Oscars, with a whole, built-in, popcorn munching, carbonated beverage swilling audience built right in.
- Duh, it’s Ellen; she has a huge fan base all her own.
- Duh, there’s a bunch of stars in the pic, with fan bases all their own.
We get that. But, less obvious and more useful observations include:
- Ellen’s tweet was authentic. It wasn’t spammy, canned or planned, at least as far as the audience was concerned. And though it may have been rehearsed and planned by Ellen, fellow actor friends just jumped on in, which made it FUN for everyone.
- The tweet pic was spontaneous. No one had a publicist approving the photo or a makeup artist touching up each actor and posing them before the shot. They didn’t vie for position or approve the photo from a sheet of 500 posed photos. It was just real humans enjoying a real human moment (and one not involving paparazzi).
- Ellen issued a challenge, to set a new record for most retweets. Everyone loves a challenge, and to be a part of a challenge.
- Ellen made it easy to share. She told folks she was posting it (easy enough to find Ellen Degeneres on Twitter). She also told us she was using hashtag #Oscars.
- Finally, she reinforced her challenge and original message with a “we’re doing it!” – letting the global audience of both viewers and tweeters know we were all part of the bigger picture, a mini “movement” of crashing Twitter with retweets of a candid, silly, selfie, turned into a “history-making” moment.
Go ahead and Google Ellen’s twitter moment and you’ll already find hundreds of articles calling this move “epic” (really?) and a moment in Oscar history. Yep, just one quick, candid photo and a few seconds to tweet it… That’s the world we’re living in.
What’s your takeaway? Share it below…
Great article and points made about why this was the coolest tweet and I agree. However, the thing that popped in my head as I was reading was: Yeah, all of this is true but it’s all forgotten five minutes later…or a day later if you happen to be reminded of it. If these coolest moments ever have a shelf life of 24 hours, I guess that says we need to be ready with 364 more of them to follow. My head is exploding. What does everyone reading this think?
True enough, Deb… but though the moment passes I think we need to focus on if/whether we use the moment to build new connections?
In example, I wrote about Ellen’s moment, shared it on Twitter, FB, etc. Lots of folks retweeted that… and a few of those folks began then began following us on Twitter. As a result, half a dozen new people signed up for our newsletter yesterday… Folks with whom we can now communicate in a more meaningful way… Can imagine Ellen had a boatload of new viewers the next day, etc.
So we need to take these moments and then leapfrog from stone to stone across the pond with ’em… seeing how far each one can take us!
That’s great, Shari. Good to know it can work. Thanks for responding.
While an enthusiastic supporter of Twitter, I thought Ellen DeGeneres was a poor hostess for the Academy Awards. The Twitter feat was classless. She lost me from the start, when she insulted Liza Minelli. Ordering pizza, and asking guests to pay? Tacky!
Ha – no doubt not everyone has the same sense of humor – our group laughed out loud at the pizza!
Bless your little heart. (For those who don’t know us, Shari and I are good friends)
This goes on my list of one of the coolest things, hands down. Another take away from this is the value of having a real, back-and-forth relationship with your fans. Ellen’s fans adore her, in part, because many of her tweets *really are her* in real time when she tweets (not a PR person or scheduled broadcast), we feel like we already know her as a person, and *want* to help her out.
And then there is her *other* fan base … the big-name stars in that picture. They are loyal because she has freely helped them all out in the past. Yeah, sure, she has a show and they go on the show for the purpose of promoting their current project, but Ellen goes well beyond that. She and her staff go to the trouble of finding out things about her guests, gives them relevant gifts, connects them with others in the industry when they need help, and otherwise authentically shares her influence. This makes them more eager to pop out of their seats for a spontaneous selfie with Ellen.
VERY good points, Bobette. Yes, Ellen is the “real deal” and folks respond to that – just like they respond to US when we’re real, and moreso when we’re real AND helping others when we can… The spread of influence is powerful (and more fun than the spread of influenza – though both can go viral, lol) Thanks for the added takeaways!!