Would Oprah be Oprah if She Started Today?

Last night Oprah posted the above tweet asking her followers to watch OWN, “especially if u have a Nielsen box.” The tweet has since been deleted without explanation (another mistake), but as expected it garnered plenty of criticism. I first saw the post when somebody I follow retweeted it and immediately knew Gary Vaynerchuk would be all over Oprah for her poor social media strategy once again, and as always Gary didn’t disappoint.

First Gary called out Oprah’s Nielsen box tweet…

Then he noted that the tweet and other replies were so “nuts” that it had to be hacked and continued to tweet about it over the course of the night. He even ended up getting a reply from Oprah’s assistant who confirmed it was actually Oprah herself tweeting from her iPad last night.

Now, love him or hate him, Gary obviously knows the social media game. And sure he can get a little “twitter cop” on others sometimes, but he’s hardly Darren Rovell on that count. So is he right and Oprah is just really bad at twitter? After all that preface, that’s what I wanted to take a quick look at…

My initial reaction to the Neilsen tweet was that it was dumb, misguided, awkward, etc. But what if the Neilsen box part was just a joke? Ok, then it would be pushing her product, but a little pushing is ok sometimes (and inevitable). The problem here is that Oprah’s carefully cultivated public persona is so entrenched that she can’t make a joke like this (if that was even the intention) and get away with it. I can, and do, attempt bad jokes that fall flat and it’s no big deal. But I don’t have a million followers and millions more who know me as TV Oprah…

What about the replies Gary called “nuts”? I looked at them and also thought some of them seemed weird and/or ridiculous coming from the Oprah we’re used to. Writing in text speak, feisty replies, weird humor, controversial opinions, etc. OMG Oprah, she’s just like us! So given that it was confirmed that these replies really were made by Oprah herself, what’s the lesson? On the one hand, she’s doing what Gary would tell her to and interacting directly with her fans. She deserves major props for that. At the same time, she’s not really of the social media generation and she seems a little lost. On top of that, she has a public persona built over a long career on television that may or may not be exactly who she is in real life, or at least not on every night in a hotel room in Georgia watching the Grammys and playing with her iPad. I’m hardly an expert, but if I were advising her I’d tell her to continue jumping in and managing her own account, replying to fans, sharing her opinions, etc., but to realize the world is watching and she needs to be on her game 24/7 if she does so. Not to say she should lose the authenticity, but someone like her can be authentic AND raise the level of discourse if she harnesses the power of twitter effectively and fine tunes her voice like we all know she can (and I’m not an Oprah fan or anything…).

More interesting to me is the question from the title of this post of whether Oprah would make it in today’s world if this sort of rough around the edges (or “nuts”) person we saw on twitter last night is her real persona and the Oprah we all know was just an elaborate artificial construction. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but there’s no doubt this less perfect Oprah would be on more prominent display in today’s world and that authenticity across social media platforms would be necessary to build a career even one hundredth the magnitude of what she’s achieved. So would she just be another mediocre snark blogger/tweeter?

I don’t think so. Maybe the written word just isn’t really Oprah’s A game. Maybe Oprah of today would focus on video blogging or podcasting and build from there. There’s a lesson here that I think Gary would agree with and it’s to know your strengths, choose the best medium to exploit those strengths and then develop a strong, authentic and consistent personal brand. Oprah’s brand equity is so strong that some stray tweets here and there won’t hurt too much, but it’s time for her to up the consistency and deliver her best at all times because we’re all watching to see what she’ll do next (or at least Gary will be and can tell the rest of us!)…

And no, I can’t really believe I just blogged about Oprah. Next time we’ll lok at Maury, Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake and Montel Williams. And stay tuned for a super special analysis of Judge Judy and The People’s Court coming in March. After all, I am a lawyer…