MTV's First Twitter Jockey: More Publicity Stunt Than Social Game Changer
It stands to reason that when MTV said it was looking to hire a "TJ", or Twitter Jockey, yesterday, it garnered all kinds of headlines, ranging from the AP's "Forget the VJ: MTV is looking for a Twitter Jockey" to OC Weekly's "MTV Wants To Be Relevant Again, Seeking Twitter Jockey." Given how deeply the original MTV VJs are embedded in the collective memory banks, this seemed like MTV turning over (yet another) new leaf -- this time, to leverage social media, which is far hotter than the channel itself has been in decades.
At least, that is, if you can make sense of this statement from network honcho Steve Friedman as to why MTV wants a TJ:
The response from our audience to moments going on through our content create this ripple, globally, and it's helped us. It helps us with ratings, it helps us inform the interests and the passions of our audience.Do you really need a TJ to corral all that social media attention? No. That's why this looks much more like a publicity stunt then as an important part of the social media revolution. Social media audiences are unruly, and don't really need to be herded -- they're perfectly capable of figuring out that Kanye West just significantly dissed Taylor Swift, and spreading the news themselves.
That's why, if this were about social first, the best move would be to have an existing MTV personality become the de facto -- ugh, TJ. That would put someone with a pre-existing following and credibility with the audience in front of MTV's social-media effort. But even that's not particularly necessary. In fact, Friedman acknowledged that half the MTV staff is on Twitter anyway; surely one of them would make a fine TJ.
As a publicity stunt, however, this could be social media gold. The TJ hunt will play out over the next two months as a competition sponsored by American Express' Zync Card. MTV has currently gotten its list down to 18 people who are all MTV viewers and have active Facebook and Twitter presences. It plans to add an additional two to the list and then hold the rest of the competition, naturally, on Twitter, where the group will participate in "Twitter-based challenges" -- whatever that means.
The final round of five contestants will compete in elimination rounds on Twitter on August 8. Thus, MTV will be promoting itself online through a group of 20 people, throughout the summer. I have little doubt that the competition will include multiple references to MTV series as well. So maybe MTV does need a TJ -- but it's a short-term strategy, not a long-term one.
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