Closer to Finding the Identity of the Person who Created the @BronxZoosCobra Twitter Account, You Can Help!

 

I might know who started the @BronxZoosCobra Twitter account.

 

The Story

 

Like everyone else I have been watching the Twitter account of @BronxZoosCobra with interest. As a person who does a lot of campaigns and work in social media and PR, these character accounts are always interesting to watch rise and fall. And like you, I have wondered, "Who is running the @BronxZoosCobra account?" I think I am pretty close to getting to the bottom of it. If you want the story, read on here, if you want to skip to my theory, head down to "The Investigation."

 

As you might have heard, the Bronx Zoo is missing its Egyptian Cobra. Someone, used it as an opportunity to start a humorous Twitter account about the snakes exploits in New York City.

 

These types of accounts are nothing new, but they capture the interest of the public in ways others can't. Throw in a mystery and it is irresistible. Witness the @BPGlobalPR Twitter account and all of the press coverage it generated last summer.

 

As for @BronxZooCobra, SKYY Vodka already been trying to reach the person running the account and offer an endorsement deal (smart). How much is an account that has gained approximately 150,000 or more fans in just 4 days worth?

 

A few reporters, like Ki Mae Heussner, a reporter for ABC News, got the person (who is not related in any way to the Bronx Zoo) to talk with her, but they wouldn't reveal their identity.

 

The Investigation

 

So, I pulled a few of my search tricks to see what I could find out about the origin of the account and I think I have a pretty good idea who started it. The bad news is that this person was already Tweeting under an assumed name. But I am pretty sure that with what I have so far, any good investigative journalist (or motivated person with more time than I have) could get to the bottom of the mystery fairly quick.

 

 

Last night Adam Schoenfeld. from Simply Measured, a new social media measurement tool sent me a report showing some data about the first 87K followers of the account (opens in Excel). It made me want more data so I could mine the first hours of the account. I turned to Google an its Realtime tool to get a timeline of all mentions.

 

This is where I quickly hit pay dirt. There is a pretty extensive community of Adam Lambert fans, former American Idol contestant. All of them use Adam Lambert in their Twitter feeds and basically talk about him all day. They are mostly women. Many of their tweets are protected. Here is @AuntieVenom, who calls herself Kween Cobra. She styles her account after a music video Lambert did with snakes.

 

I believe that @AuntieVenom is @BronxZoosCobra.
Let me unravel it for you

 

The Timeline

 

 

• It seems that the person running this account changed the name of the existing @AuntieVenom Account to @BronxZooCobra (This account was changed again a little later, notice the missing "s"?). This is pretty easy to do.

 

• Her first tweets were still in her old @AuntiVenom voice, to a friend @styleandchiche,. who is in New Jersey. This may the person that is most likely to know the real name of @AuntieVenom, but who knows.

 

• Pretty soon, her existing Adam Lambert community started ReTweeting her new crossover voice. The tweets were funny, and I am sure everyone was amused.

 

 

• Then some of her friends/followers commented on the name change.

 

• She responds playfully

 

 

• Somewhere between March 27th in the evening and March 28th in the afternoon, the accounts name is changed again to add the "S. " I honestly don't know why except when you go to the original @BronxZooCobra, it says the account was suspended. So, perhaps she was notified it was about to be suspended and used the same process, as mentioned above, to jump ship with all of her new followers? Or perhaps she started over? I think this was the first tweet after the change (notice there is no avatar).

• @BronxZooCobra adopted her current avatar.

Need More Data

 

@BronxZooCobra has esssscaped again. To catch up we need more data.

 

Would love to see more data from my my friends over Simply Measured or Radian6 (who capture the Twitter pipe in their monitoring tool) to get a good idea of when exactly each of these conversations occured. I love the Google tool, but it is a blunt instrument and hard to find stuff in there (read: needle in haystack)

 

Also, would also be cool to see how all these Adam Lambert fans are connected which might be up Spiral16's alley (would love to see it as a test). The ones that I saw in the search that caught my eye included:

• @inglamwetrust
• @ashleycastle
• @borneobaby
• @loreletti
• @styleandchiche
• @glampysunflower

These were most likely @AuntieVenom followers. A search right at the inception of the @bronxzoocobra account on the 27th would probably do it.

 

Also, if you are reading this and have advanced research skills, go for it! Looking forward to what comes of the research. It was a fun exercise using the tools I had on hand.

 

UPDATE: @AuntieVenom comes out of protected status for an hour or so and after many denials, admits to being the one who started @BronxZooTweets. However, not to running the newer @BronxZoosTweets account. I honestly have no way to prove otherwise. As I said, we need more data and I need some big guns here! We need a detailed look at all three feeds to see if anything triangulates.

 

 

In this tweet she says that switched back to @AuntieVenom from the @BronxZooCobra name. However, if you head over to the Twitter page for the first account, you will see that it says it is suspended. Which is a specific state reserved for accounts with TOS or other issues (read Twitter procedures here). Only thing I am sure of is that we don't have the whole story yet. Please add anything you know to the comments.

 

Why the Quest for Social Media ROI Will Never Die! And Why It Shouldn’t

No one wants to waste their time.

Also, people are very interested in how to start calculating ROI. I checked with the Google Adwords Keyword tool and found that nearly 78K people search for some variation of “measuring ROI of social media” every month. That is a lot of people that are interested in measuring social media marketing and public relations efforts.

In fact, if you came to this post from Google, you can read some of the theory below (and about some nifty tools), then you can jump to the good stuff. I have an extensive collection of bookmarks of the ROI on social media and a measurement category with some nuts and bolts on how to measure public relations and social media.

Also, if you want to get some amazing books, you can jump to the end of this post or over to the contest where you can win one of two new books that will help you start to put together a social media measurement program.

Value Drives Measurement

Organizations, both for and nonprofit, need one to be sure that the valuable time they spend on social media, public relations and marketing matter to their most important constituents, be they customers, donors, members, etc.

The resources of a company are finite and need to be allocated wisely. Every hour someone spends on Twitter is another hour they might be engaged in other marketing activities that are more valuable – both to the company and to the people it is trying to reach. And thus the most common question from management:

“What is the value, or ROI, of a particular marketing or PR activity.”

And now that social media is not a fledgling enterprise anymore, with big brands investing millions of dollars in campaigns with social media as a primary or major aspect. And even nonprofits need to make decisions about participating in contests and activating their donor base via social media. What are the benefits and tradeoffs.

The only way to know is to measure.

This chart of a Marketing Measurement Continuum spells it out. On the bottom rung is Activities-Based marketing and PR, here there is rarely measurement.

The real magic occurs as you move up the continuum and get better metrics, from operational insights, to more efficient processes, to business outcomes and finally to being able to predict an outcome.

It takes work, and accountability. But the payoff is huge. And as you can see, it is a PROCESS. You don’t start with predictive analytics. Some good Marketing Mix Modeling dashboards might even take over a year of data before you get a lot of predictive insight. Same with calculating Customer Lifetime Value. You might need a year’s worth of data about the behavior of your current customers or donors to get reliable data. Here is a cool calculator to get you started.

Two of the people who influenced many of us in the areas of social media measurement include Katie Paine and Olivier Blanchard. They both recently released new books on the subject, Katie’s “Measure What Matters,” and Olivier’s “Social Media ROI” book. I have already started to dig into Katie’s book and Olivier’s is on the way, yay for Amazon Prime.

The Zoetica team would like to share one of these book with you.

CLICK ON THIS POST

Tell us why you think ROI WIll Never Die on the website above. The first 10 REAL answers win.

And as much as I LOVE to get comments here, posts on this page don’t count. :-) What is the ROI of that?