Sunday night Twitter

Love him or hate him, and his x-factor productions, you have to admire Simon Cowell’s commercialism to keep interest in a story running.

The ‘Jedward’ saga generates so much media interest for the X-factor that Simon could not bring himself to judge them out of the competition (no matter how much he claims to hate them) so he, once again, side-stepped the issue and left it to the public.

Putting aside my personal preferences and the fact that this is supposed to be a singing talent competition (Simon C’s definition when it suites him), I decided to get some real-time responses and follow consumer interest through Twitter with #xfactor.

Wow! Talk about a hornet’s nest. At one point, just a few minutes after ‘Simon Cowardly’s’ decision to go public, there were upwards of 1000 new tweets ever 15 seconds. ITV2 were claiming the telephone lines were hot with callers but I can’t imagine that there were a fraction of the nuber of people tweeting their frustration and anger.

Today I’ve received invites to join Facebook groups that ‘Ban X-factor from TV’ and a few others that want to do some horrid things to Mr Cowell.  My RSS feeds are hot with news stories and, since I started typing this entry, there’s been another 1748 tweets on #xfactor (so far).

I don’t know if Mr Cowell is on FB, Myspace or tweets or does anything else with Social Media. If he does, well done Simon, your finger is well and truly on the pulse. If he doesn’t, I doubt he’ll much care for what’s said about him and his X-factor.   However, there are tens of thousands of conversation going on every second on the social network and to completely ignore them all would be utter maddness; for Mr Cowell, the X-factor, and anyone else who’s not listening to the chatter regarding their brands.