Tweet stats paint bleak future for old media

Record executives and marketing personnel are struggling, now more than ever, to make their products and talent relevant to an array of tech-savvy millennials.

Gone are the days where actual record sales were the metric for success.  The recent trend has been over-the-top award show performances that place the star out like a marionette.

And the new measure? Tweets-per-minute.

While the title for top tweet index is still the 2012 presidential race (327,452 tweets), Miley Cyrus’s over-discussed risqué VMA performance falls in second place, netting 306,100 tweets and breaking the previous 231,000 tweet record during the 2013 Super Bowl black out.

This might just seem like numbers to a casual observer, but in the age of digital piracy, it’s pay dirt for a record company. They have to set the benchmark with conspicuous indicators of social media consumption in order to see that their brand is getting out to the consumer.

It’s important to remember that twitter is a tool, and that such grandstanding only marginalizes actual tweets of historical importance. Certainly 20 years from now, no one is going to frame the cultural significance of “OMG #MileyCyrus.”

But what might be forever immortalized is a tweet from May 1, 2011, composed by Sohaib Athar of Abbottabad, Pakistan:

“Helicopter is hovering above Abottabad at 1AM (rare event).”

Athar’s tweet inadvertently exposed the start of a U.S. raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound.  Tweets culled during the Arab spring have also been collected and archived for posterity; ensuring a nearly limitless supply of tedious context analysis work for graduate students.

So while these spectacles gather a lot of hype on social networks, there’s one thing that can be certain.  They’re going to have to be increasingly provocative to catch the star-struck eyes and tweet-deck cramped fingers. Soon, nothing will satiate us, and then where will we go?

We will be unphased once the gig is up, and consumers and media viewers will get tired, change the channel and simply ignore the gimmick.

Before any renaissance, there has to be a dark age.  We just think that it can’t come soon enough.