You never know who you’re going to be sitting next to at a
Search Insider Summit, or what you might learn from them about the world of online marketing and media. So I was tickled to sit down next to Topher Kohan this morning, because he was the guy to ask
about something that’s been nagging me for weeks.
Kohan, is CNN.com’s search marketing guru, and the guy who makes things click
across the news portal’s various sites and platforms.
So what’s been nagging me? Well, honestly, it was about the whole Twitter
debacle, and the fact that actor and Nikon pitchman Ashton Kutcher beat CNN.com to the 1 million Twitter followers milestone.
“It
wasn’t a great day to show up at work and look at the screen and see Ashton Kutcher on it,†Kohan recalls, adding that the press spin was something of a misnomer, because
Kutcher’s Twitter follower base only beat CNN.com’s breaking news feed, and not the entire CNN.com group’s total Twitter base. But hey, that wouldn’t have been as sexy a
story, right.
An even more interesting story, I learned from Kohan, is the fact that CNN.com actually “acquired†its breaking news
Twitter feed from a twentysomething user who created it as a means to update himself on the feeds. Well it worked pretty well, and now that user is a paid consultant to CNN.com. And who says Twitter
hasn’t hit on a monetization model yet.