Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Jimmy Fallon's Twitter Strategy



Late Night with Jimmy Fallon has been tech heavy of late, and getting heavier. Clearly Jimmy Fallon is acutely attuned to two trends in his attempts to navigate the choppy waters of late night teevee: the transformative nature of the digital and the importance of the hipsters. By way of courting the hipsters, Fallon has "purloined" The Roots, borrowing their indie-band street cred, and tapping them to be his house band (and, we cannot fail to note, collect regular network-sized paychecks). And with regards to these internets, Fallon tapped show executive producer Gavin Purcell, formerly exec producer of G4's signature daily series "Attack of the Show" to join "Late Night. Twitter seems to be a big part of the show's strategy. Bill Harris of The Winnipeg Sun writes:

"Having spoken with Fallon three times in the months leading up to his debut, he consistently championed how cutting-edge his show would be in terms of embracing the technology that the 'Millennials' have embraced. But there was precious little evidence of that in Week No. 1, outside of some awkward product placement and saying the word "Twitter" every now and then."


Gavin Purcell today tweets:

"@kevinrose Between the followers that you and @jimmyfallon have on Twitter we could get like 500K people doing something. That could be fun."


And:

"Russell Brand has a good twitter following @rustyrockets. Therefore, our guests tomorrow + @jimmyfallon will have 600K+ combined followers."


Since starting on Twitter on December 4th, Fallon has Tweeted 462 times with the bulk of those tweets surrounding the unveiling of his late night show. On February 10th, for example, Fallon Tweeted an email for his followers to provide information about themselves, presumably for some sort of segment on the show.

It is not a bad strategy and, because of the speed and faddishness of social networking, the show is working live, in an unprecedented digital landscape, without a net -- so to speak.

UPDATE: Fallon and Twitter.

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