Twitter is the sound of one hand clapping

Well, almost. According to a Mashable’s coverage of the Sysomos report on the Twitter ecosystem 71% of all tweets produce no reaction. Taking time to Tweet is not quite the sound of one hand clapping but it’s not far from it.

"Perhaps our tweets really are just pointless babble after all, or maybe they’re just so remarkable that our followers don’t want to taint them with a reply or retweet. We’ll leave it to you to decide."

Over on Excapite they have another interesting take on the effectiveness of social media and the wisdom of crowds based on the very different Super Bowl strategy embraced by Pepsi this year.


Apparently Pepsi spends about $30 Million on their campaigns during the annual Super Bowl festival of advertising. However this year Pepsi decided to fund a number community renewal events across the U.S. instead of advertising during the Super Bowl.

The marketing exercise is called “Refresh Everything” and it’s costing $20 million. Today it boasts a Facebook page with over 400,000 fans.

Putting the press coverage that the program has received aside for the moment let’s put this campaign into some perspective as an advertising and marketing strategy. If Pepsi had stayed with the Super Bowl they would have reached over 106.5 million people (perhaps as high 153.4 Million) at an average cost of $0.28 per Football Fan. Instead Pepsi now has 400,000+ Facebook Fans acquired at a cost of just under $50.oo each.

I doubt if Pepsi will be counting on Facebook fans as the sole measure of the performance of the campaign. But I do believe these Virtual Fans of the ”Crowd Sourcing” campaign provides us with some insight into the relative cost vs. effectiveness of social media.