Last Monday, KML had the honor of attending the red carpet premiere of the horror/comedy One Eyed Monster, starring… Ron Jeremy (playing it straight - it’s rated R people!!) and Amber Benson (from Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame).

Our Mission:

To help represent… er… the star of the movie, The “Monster”, on Twitter while he worked the premiere.

While this may not sound like your typical work assignment, it’s one that the KARMA crew enjoyed — as we, his “Monsterettes”, were able to report live from the movie premiere and share details with all of the movie (and monster) fans.

Our approach?  Report on arrivals, comment throughout the event, share Twitpics, and respond to fans over the course of the movie and premiere.

While the premiere is long over, you can still follow our star on Twitter at @RonsMonster (note- be prepared for some candid remarks and humorous, slightly NSFW photos).

And for a small plug for our client… One Eyed Monster is not only hilarious, it’s now available at Amazon.com.

Monsterettes, over and out.

In recent days, we’ve been discussing Twitter authority and tracking people in the public eye such as Diddy (@iamdiddy) and John Mayer (@johncmayer) reaching out to the masses via Twitter.

Many celebrities have established their Twitter Persona and actively engage, as we see on blogs such as Celebrity Tweet which give a real time feed on celebs like Solange Knowles (@solangeknowles), Ryan Seacrest (@ryanseacrest), Britney Spears (@britneyspears) and Greg Grunberg (@greggrunberg), who all have jumped on the Twitter bandwagon.

While many of these people in the public eye have already embraced their inner geek, many are just getting started with establishing their profiles.  And then there are those celebrities who are using their voice and influence to promote others’ — the Twitter Influencers.  As word of mouth marketers, we’re obsessed with the power of the shout out and its influence on the Twitter population we like to call Tweeps.

Take the recent Jimmy Fallon experiment as an example.  A few nights ago, Jimmy’s guest was Bryan Brinkman (@bryanbrinkman), who had 7 total followers on Twitter. After the shout out from Jimmy (and the founders of Digg also appearing on the show), Bryan now has almost 35,000 followers, and growing by the hour.  The shout out was then featured, written about and syndicated on blogs and sites (like this very one) which continues the shout out momentum.

Another great example is Ellen DeGeneres who talked about Twitter on her show very recently. The day her show’s Twitter profile @theellenshow was launched, there were just a little over 9,000 followers.  She now has over 200,000, growing rapidly.

While most of us aren’t able to appear on television to get the official shout out to spread the word about our Twitter presence, the power of influential bloggers is not to be underestimated as a way to grow your Twitter audience.  Mashable, a highly influential blog in the social media space regularly features people to follow in several verticals, ranging from Professors to Brands and the People Behind Them.  It’s safe to say that this blog drove a few followers to those profiles.  Ok, maybe more than a few.

We’ll be keeping our eye on the Twitter Influencers and paying attention to the power of the shout out.

We recently wrote about our fascination with the Twitter phenomenon known as @iamdiddy.

Sean Combs, once known as Puff Daddy is someone who certainly gets what Twitter is all about — having established almost 165,000 followers (30,000 more than when we last wrote).

We at KARMA Media Labs love to follow people who inspire and teach us what Social Media is all about, which is why we we’re even more impressed to see Diddy not only take a proactive approach to “Take The Power Back” on Twitter, he’s also apparently listening to what is being said by his fans online.

We’ve seen many celebrities in recent months embracing Twitter, including Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk), Demi Moore (@mrskutcher), John Mayer (@johncmayer) and others — but we love that Diddy’s not just talking to his fans, he’s listening.

Within 24 hours of writing our blog post, we found our words featured on Diddy’s Official Web Site Diddy.com, his official MySpace page, and linked on Bad Boy Entertainment.

So again, we want to thank Diddy for the shout out and for inspiring us to not only Take the Power Back on Twitter, but reminding us how important it is to to keep our eye on brand and reputation conversation. Diddy is someone who truly understands what social media is all about.

Image above from Diddy.com.

I was reminded today by a new post by Leslie Gornstein, our favorite Answer B!tch, that people are making a name for themselves on Twitter. Some are celebrities, some pretend to be celebrities, some are figureheads and some are common folk (like most of us).

Whether you have a huge following, or just a handful, here are a few tips for establishing your Twitter authority and how said authority is determined:

• Follower Ratio: How many are following you over how many you are following. It’s ideal to have a 1 or higher but never a fraction of 1.
• ReTweets:   The number of times you are retweeted.  The more value you add in links or commentary the more likely people are to echo your tweets.
• Replies: The number of times you are replied to. The more people that reply to or respond to you the more influential you are.
• Clicks: The number of people that click on your links. Using a url shortening service like http://bit.ly/ allows you to track how many people are clicking on your link.

To find out more about the authority of Twitter profiles, and if those celebrity tweeps you follow are real or bogus, check out Leslie’s article on E! Online today (and thanks Leslie for the KML shout out).