When we recommend that entrepreneurs, consultants, and coaches put social media marketing tools to work as a strategy to help build their brand, we are not exactly talking about a coach with a whistle around his neck and a team of sweaty collegiate ball players practicing dribble drills.
But in some ways, if you think about it, coaching a team of young athletes is one form of being a “life coach” (albeit, not the one we had in mind). And clearly Coach John Calipari, men’s head basketball coach at the University of Kentucky, has mastered a few social media skills worth discussing in addition to figuring out how to build winning basketball teams.
On May 1, the Obvious Expert blog posted “Social Media Marketing via Twitter; It’s Cropping Up Everywhere.” To fill you in on the back-story, rival coach Tom Crean of Indiana University challenged the University of Kentucky’s new coach, John Calipari, to see who could build the largest following on Twitter. The challenge was thrown down, somewhere about April 28, so the two coaches have each had less than six weeks to see what kind of following they can attract by tweeting to their team’s fans.
Congrats to Tom Crean, for at the time this post is being written, he has built a following of over 7,200 fans … not bad at more than a 1,000 additional followers each week.
But brace yourself, because in this same window of time, John Calipari has amassed (and that seems to be the appropriate word for describing this phenomenon) nearly 170,000 followers! He is about to break into Twitter’s list of top 200, based on the number of followers. And while clearly he has a way to go before he hits (if he hits) Twitter’s elite Top 20 (Twitter accounts that all have nearly 1 million followers with most of the Top 20 having more than 1 million), he has averaged roughly 28,000 followers every week for each of the last 6 weeks. And that is just remarkable.
... And did we mention that he is Kentucky’s new coach and has yet to coach even one game there?
In upcoming Obvious Expert blog posts, we are going to keep you updated on what Coach Calipari already had going for him to help him build this type of following, but more importantly, on what he’s done to make it happen for himself by applying principles of How to Position Yourself as The Obvious Expert.
How many Twitter followers have you added since April 28, 2009?
