The Power of Oprah / Twitter and KFC

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I am still astounded at how influential Oprah's TV show is. I think her radio channel has been a middling success, though I believe her magazine still does well. But Oprah is a proper broadcaster, and TV is her medium, as much as Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh's is radio.

Reading an article about Twitter's founders in today's NY Times, I was again impressed that after Oprah "joined" Twitter, traffic to the site - whatever that means, since it's an API as well - increased tremendously. I'm sure it was somewhat coincidental, as so many other celebrities had jumped on the Twitter bandwagon in the previous months, but I feel that Oprah's participation gave her audience permission to join.

What's also worth noting is that it's not simply that Oprah is influential unto herself - that he audience is just so massive, though it is sizable. It's that her viewers are influential. They chat to each other - offline and online. They have communities (on Oprah.com and CafeMom.com and beyond, and information sharing is part of their lives. Since the Internet's beginning, or at least in the past five years, she's become more influential, because the Internet has enabled her audience to act as evangelists. That's why so many brands recognize her as Ground Zero. It's her zealous fans enabled by technology as much as her cult of personality. Witness the KFC phenomenon, which affected men as much as women.

It would seem that to fully understand a personality's influence, one needs to not look at that person's sheer reach, but the nature of that person's audience and how they communicate beyond their inner circle. Even how they use technology to communicate.

That's a pretty complicated equation.

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