This article titled “Twitter followers are worth $2.50 each a month? I’m rich at last” was written by Paul Carr, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 29th December 2011 15.00 UTC
Like you, I’ve long dreamed of my “Antiques Roadshow moment”. The life-changing – probably televised – discovery that the creaking old rocking horse which formed the cornerstone of my childhood cowboy games was once the formative plaything of a young Catherine the Great. “Conservatively,” some kindly old rocking horse expert would smile, “I’d put its value at around £200,000.” “Gosh,” I’d blush, before insisting, “but, of course, I could never part with it.” (Two hours later: eBay.)
Until yesterday lunchtime, though, my Antiques Roadshow moment remained a wonderful fantasy. And then, just after boarding my flight home from Heathrow to Las Vegas, I heard my iPhone beep.
“We’re interested in getting some comment on the story below,” began the email. I almost didn’t click the link – we’d just been told to turn off our electronic items and I didn’t want to be Alec Baldwinned off the plane. But the name in the “from” field belonged to an editor at the Guardian and – yunno – could be an easy hundred quid, I thought.
Click.
Holy shit.
My moment had arrived.
The “story below” concerned PhoneDog, an obscure phone review website that is suing former employee Noah Kravitz for $340,000 over a “stolen” Twitter account. During his employment Kravitz had set up the account – @Phonedog_Noah – to tweet the usual brand-humanising nonsense that these people tweet. On leaving the company, Kravitz insists, PhoneDog were happy for him to keep the (now renamed) account, on the understanding that he would occasionally tweet out links to their phone reviews. At some point, though the relationship got messy. Now PhoneDog wants its followers back, and it also wants a third of a million dollars in damages: $2.50 for every one of the account’s 17,000 followers, multiplied by the number of months since Kravitz left his job.
When the Guardian emailed me to ask if I wanted to write something about the lawsuit, I expect it was hoping for something along the lines of: “Sheesh. It’s as if companies have learned nothing since the late 90s when CEOs blithely entrusted the construction of their website to the teenage son (always son) of their next-door neighbour, without stopping to consider, say, the intellectual property implications of non-employees registering domain names, building databases and suchlike. The specific circumstances behind Phonedog v Kravitz remain murky but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this is just the first of a cavalcade of lawsuits – and a parade of retroactive rights grabs – that we see as it once again dawns on companies that they should take all aspects of their online identity seriously.”
Maybe the Guardian hoped for even more than that. I am, after all, an expert in this bullshit. Perhaps a history lesson: how employees often spot the potential of technology before their bosses. How the first draft of the Economist’s website was a home-brewed affair, knocked up by one of its correspondents for $120 in 1996 – or how, as long ago as 1991, New York Times tech reporter John Markoff registered nyt.com on behalf of his employer, well before anyone thought to also buy nytimes.com. How, given that Twitter accounts tend to be directly associated with a single person, there are real dangers in a individual employee – simply by virtue of being the most web-savvy person in the office – becoming the de facto spokesperson for an entire company. Pseudonyms are déclassé on Twitter, but it’s possible to make a compelling argument in favour of companies creating fictional spokestweeters – “Geoff from XYZ widgets” – inhabited by whichever staff member holds he social media reins on any given day. Other staff are welcome to tweet too, of course, but following the BBC model where employees must make it clear they don’t speak for the corporation.
Recalling that I never miss an opportunity to mention that I briefly studied law at university, maybe my editors would permit me make some woefully ill-informed stab at the strength of PhoneDog’s legal position. The company seems to regard its erstwhile Twitter followers as a sort of mailing list or customer database, which brings it neatly under the heading of a trade secret. Ker-ching! But, unlike mailing lists, Twitter follower lists are publicly displayed, so a PhoneDog victory in this case could bring about an exciting new legal precedent. Or not. The case might just be tossed out. I have no idea.
The point is, when I clicked on the link and read about Kravitz and his Twitter account, I didn’t immediately think about history repeating itself, or whether companies should use shell tweeters or even if this might be a chance to trot out some half-remembered fragment from a lecture in company law. No. What I thought was this…
“This is it! This is my Antiques Roadshow moment!”
You see, I have 10,000 or so followers on Twitter and, until yesterday I had regarded them much like I might have regarded that hypothetical old rocking horse: if the rocking horse was made up of pornographers, spammers and maybe half a dozen normal people who haven’t yet got round to unfollowing me. Sure they were fun to play with: but valuable? Please.
But now, thanks to PhoneDog, I discover that all those people – my wonderful, important, mission-critical database of followers – are apparently worth somewhere north of $25,000 a month. That’s three hundred grand a year! Sorry, I’d love to write a comment on all of this, but there’s no way on Earth I’m missing out on my big payday for a lousy hundred quid. Not when I can use this opportunity to make a much more important statement …
PhoneDog – if you really, truly believe that Twitter followers are worth $2.50 a month each then this is your lucky day. I’ve got three hundred grand’s worth just lying around taking up space! I mean, of course I could never bear to part with them but – shall we say $150,000 for cash?
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