I am Spartacus

Or, Stupid Social Media Tricks.

OK, this is just getting crazy. Last Thursday South Carolina Senator and general, all around asshole, Jim DeMint announced that he was cashing in and leaving the US Senate to take over the absurdly well funded Heritage Foundation. Within a few minutes I realized that the natural choice to replace him should be South Carolina’s favorite son, one Stephen Colbert. 

Without much hesitation I created a twitter profile (@ColbertforSC), customized it a bit with a South Carolina flag background, a picture of Colbert saluting and an American flag header.  I then sent out a few tweets (“Reporting for duty, South Carolina!”) before turning my attentions elsewhere. Little did I know that my good friend Matt Ortega was simultaneously launching colbertforsenate.com in record time because that’s what he’s just damned good at.

Before I knew it, the feed had over 500 followers, including a pretty healthy contingent of media folks from both South Carolina and DC. Suddenly reporters were tweeting me questions about my (Colbert’s) intentions. Stories were popping up all over the web about Colbert’s interest in the seat in places like MSNBC, ABC News, CBS News, NPR, Salon, USA Today, The Week, The Hill, The San Francisco Examiner and The Atlantic. CBS News even did a segment that showed both Matt’s site and my feed:

Then Colbert addressed all the attention himself on his show that very night. Meanwhile, my @ColbertforSC twitter feed was picking up followers like crazy. I realized when I woke up Saturday morning that I really should have tweaked the email preferences for the profile because my inbox had thousands of notifications from twitter about new followers. It was a mess.

And then things got really surreal. Public Policy Polling polled South Carolinians about their favorites to replace the retiring DeMint, with Colbert emerging as the clear favorite. This led to Colbert again doing an entire segment on the subject where the show used video from the CBS report. 

Needless to say, this whole thing just keeps getting both weirder and somehow even more fun. The feed has over 4,000 followers now. It’s really fun to speak in Colbert’s voice and to watch so many seemingly sophisticated journalists try to figure out if the feed is genuine or not.