Instant Uprising: The Late Show Wars
Ditch the pitch fork. Snuff the torch. When today’s angry villagers rise up, they dash to Twitter and Facebook.
The NBC Tonight Show dust-up has shined yet another light on the power of social media.
Most of the noise provided empathy and support for Conan O’Brien, clearly the victor thus far in the court of public opinion… as Jay Leno and NBC execs get painted as villains or village idiots.
Witness the grass roots growth of the Facebook fan page “I’m with Coco.” I checked the fan count a couple days ago — more than 166,000 people had signed up to stand up for their high-haired hero. That’s pretty astounding, given that the page had only been a few days old! Today, that number topped 489,000. Feel free to check out the latest fan count.
And fellow celebrities have joined the fray, voicing their support for Conan on their Twitter streams. And in the meantime, the #TeamConan, #GoConan and #Coco hash tags are flying freely. Just do a search on Twitter.
Throw in some public insults from NBC exec Dick Ebersol, and this appears to be a classic example of a bad situation made worse. Faster and fiercer than anyone ever imagined.
Which leads marketers to ponder how we may one day need to address a similar uprising — either intentionally trying to rally customers/fans around a cause, or working to manage an unhappy constituency. This we know: in the new social world order, we’ll need to act fast. For the battle will be instant.
