I love Stephen Colbert. If I wasn’t in a wonderful relationship, and if Stephen was a little more physically hot (instead of merely intellectually devastating) I’d absolutely cyberstalk him.
Stephen Colbert has a huge following
- Twitter followers: 2,197,990
- Facebook Page: 1,803,942
- Online votes in 2006 to have a Hungarian bridge names after him: 17,231,724
This following doesn’t need much prompting—sometimes none—to take his awesome antics to the next level.
Case in point: Jon Kyl. If you don’t know the story, Jon Kyl is a U.S. politician who made a sweeping statement that 90% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion. The actual figure is 3%. Mr. Kyl’s office released a statement the following day that his remark was “not intended to be a factual statement.”
Hello?
Not surprisingly, Mr. Colbert went to town with this. As quick as possible (because # remarks are not archived on Twitter) visit Twitter and search for #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement.
The evening Stephen Colbert’s cutting segment aired, he began tweeting wickedly funny items with that hashtag. His fans followed suit, which got to a measurable onslaught—46.7 new posts PER MINUTE. He showed a screen capture of this stat. I tried to find it in video of the episode, without any luck.
All this to say…once in a while, have some fun with social media. Let your personality shine through. But maybe don’t say someone likes to throw babies at people. Unless you use the correct hashtag.