farfromfearless
Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin Just rocked the Tweetsphere
Last Friday the media erupted as Republican Candidate John McCain announced his running mate as a 44-year old self proclaimed “hockey mom”, consult The Times in case you’ve been living under a rock. Of course this news spread through traditional media channels like wildfire but there was one channel I never suspected even though it was right under my nose. Twitter was sitting as usual but this time It wasn’t your standard set of tweets, this trend seemed to mimic that of a Chuck Norris variety.
According to Champlain Professor, Elaine Young, this guy Started the whole thing with the tweet, “MichaelTurk Little known fact: Sarah Palin used to wrestle kodiak bears in Alaskan bare knuckles fight clubs.”. The funny part is he seems to have a conservative slant to his tweets leading me to think he started a “Little Know Fact” tweme as a PR boost for the out-of-left-field VP candidate. This trend had the more liberal tweetspehere singing like a bird. I caught wind of this, about 36 hours after the announcement, thanks to the good guys over at HubSpot. My Twitter feed read, “Hubspot Little Known Fact: Sara Palin is a HubSpot customer” This of course being for the Tweet meme and not actually true. I then checked out the Tweets for the phrase and found literally thousands of posts spewing random “facts” about the Alaskan Hockey Mom. I as well as HubSpot found this quite amusing, especially since it was updating every minute or so at 4 AM on a Saturday Night (yes I was on Twitter at 4 AM, so what?). This trend has taken the 2.0 landscape by storm; here’s the current situation:
- there is now a website dedicated to the trend, http://www.palinfacts.com/ I would also like to point out that I found this as the first result on Google under “Sarah Palin Facts”
- There is a Sarah Palin: Little Known Fact Generator
- There are over 3400 tweets with the hash tag “Little Known Fact”
- This Story is 5th on Google for the phrase “little known fact”
My personal favorite is one tweeted to the creator himself:
@Micheal Turk Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin once won a mayoral election by getting 909 votes, all of whom were her family.
And of course my own creation:
fullyadam Little Known Fact Sara Palin was found in Al Capone’s glove compartment by Geraldo Rivera.
Some would ask, “is this good or bad for the young hopeful?” To be honest I don’t think anyone in the republican party has ever even heard of Twitter, and I don’t think any of them even use the internet seeing as how it was invented by Al Gore. This being the case, they wont lose any “loyal Bush-ies” from this press. The only thing I can see comming out of this is people like you and me getting a big kick out of it.
What do you think?
6 people have left comments
Rick Burnes said:
Adam —
Great post, and thanks for pointing to HubSpot. I, too, have been surprised that the “little know fact” meme hasn’t gotten more attention outside of Twitter. Maybe it’s because it’s hard for people who don’t use Twitter to wrap their heads around the idea of thousands of people spewing out random apocryphal tidbits about McCain’s VP choice.
In any case, I thought it was pretty amazing, and was checking my twitter account all Friday night watching dozens of new Sarah Palin updates role in.
Rick Burnes
@rickburnes
Adam said:
Thanks for the feedback, Rick. I do think your hunch about twitter is on point, currently twitter doesn’t seem to be so main stream yet. Although@BarackObama is using it and thriving with somewhere around 74,000 followers. I do think non-users have trouble wrapping their heads around it, not so much the concept but the understanding the reason for the popularity. I found myself excited about the humorous tweeme and having trouble conveying the joke to non-users.
KRubin said:
I think it’s great that Obama is on Twitter collecting followers and using it as another means to reach out. His campaign has embraced the social media world in a whole new way, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out come November. However, I do agree that the chatter about Palin probably won’t hurt the McCain campaign much as I expect the Twitter-sphere is largely Obama supporters.
As for non-Twitter users, have you ever tried to explain the fail whale to someone who has never been on Twitter before?
Adam said:
Good point, Obama really is taking advantage of social media in a huge way. I think this is great from a marketing perspective because it shows that he really is progressive and knows his audience. It will certainly be interesting to see how it plays out because I’m sure his twitter feed will not convert any conservatives, however it will strengthen the loyal followers’ beliefs. This is a good example of Inbound Marketing, market your message to those who want to hear it and keep quality customers for life.
And yes, it is tough to describe a true pop-subculture icon. 
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