When we asked our friends at PeekAnalytics to tell us who the most influential ad execs on Twitter are, we expected to get back a list of the usual suspects. You know, the most famous CEOs at the biggest agencies, plus Seth Godin, Lee Clow's Beard, and perhaps KBS+'s Lori Senecal, who once bought promoted tweets for herself.
In fact, none of the huge names of advertising are influential on Twitter, according to PeekAnalytics. The company ranked our Twitterers by "social pull" as opposed to mere total followers. Social pull is a "metric which takes into account not only the quantity of each audience's connections across 60 social networking sites, but also how active and connected, and therefore influential, those connections are."
One of the names on our list has an amazing 313,000 followers. Most have more than 10,000, with many in the mid five figures.
We learned that to be successful on Twitter as an ad exec, you have to be positive and upbeat. No Debbie Downers here.
The way to get retweeted is to give advice, and offer a lot of aphorisms about success in business.
The medium also lends itself to specialists like John Sonnhalter. He has nearly 14,000 followers on Twitter but few on Madison Avenue will recognize his name — he specializes in ads and sales for the construction business.
25. Dave Kerpen, CEO of Likeable Media, a social media agency that counts GE as a client.
Social Pull: 406
Followers: 55,570
Typical tweet:"Turning A Job That Sucked Into Something Incredible - Business Tips from @Mixergy http://bit.ly/1bios2l" (Kerpen's tweets tend to be career tips.)
24. Jeffrey Zeldman of Happy Cog, a design agency that has MTV and Zappos as a client.
Social Pull: 409
Followers: 313,152
Typical tweet:"What knitting was to our grandmothers, unbuggering iCloud is in our time." (Zeldman's tweets tend to be personal, stream of consciousness stuff.)
23. Bruce Terkel of Turkel Brands, a branding agency for Miami travel and tourism clients.
Social Pull: 416
Followers: 9,794
Typical tweet:"'Advertising doesn't create product advantage. It only conveys it.' Bill Bernbach #brandisms 126/365 "
See the rest of the story at Business Insider