I'm definitely not a big Eminem fan but his return is a huge event, his album should do well based on such early indicators as Amazon preorders and I'm certainly trying to get my share of the action with multiple posts even as I question some of the ethics of the marketing campaign.

That said, I think his marketing has mostly followed now traditional forms from tv to magazines to the web, with some fun twists thrown in and, since his return is such an event, there's been a firestorm of coverage. So when I was contacted for responses to his campaign for an AdAge article ultimately titled How Eminem's Marketing Team Is Using Twitter to Build Buzz, I downplayed the Twitter angle in my response.

However other bloggers took a different angle and were included. Elliott Wilson did a particularly nice job on the Stan/Twitter connection while Scott Yeti related the wider campaign to movie marketing. I became background as in "some in the hip-hop-marketing world downplay the impact of the messaging service."

And that's cool. Not everybody makes it in to anything and Wilson, in particular, is very good at providing soundbites that feed the expectations of other members of the media. But looking at the article now, I have to say that the current hype about Twitter has clearly oversahdowed what's actually working in the Relapse campaign:

"According to Compete, Eminem.com reached 113,868 unique visitors during April, while the most popular of his tweets — which linked to Therelapse.com on May 7 — reached at least 41,704 people within just one week, according to an analysis of data provided to Ad Age by Tweetreach. And data provided by Native Digital, the start-up behind music-buzz tracker We Are Hunted, suggest that Eminem was the most-talked-about artist on Twitter last week, the week before the album's release."

I'm assuming the mention of Eminem.com stats compared to Twitter stats makes the 41k people in one week for a single tweet look good but are those "impressive results"?

I've never gone to Eminem.com before but I have written multiple posts and embedded videos such as We Made You which, in an apparently official version, has already received 1,964,277 views and has, no doubt, been shown via all sorts of other channels of distribution.

Now that's not to say that the occasional posts, 20 in total, to Eminem's Twitter account haven't had an impact but the real impact has come from the fact that Twitter is a hottie, everybody wants to cover her like they used to cover Paris Hilton and so Eminem's use of Twitter has received far more coverage online reaching what I would argue is a much bigger audience than the 83,646 followers of his skimpy Twitter stream or the 40k "within just one week" that surely included nonfollowers who clicked through from other sites to a highly publicized tweet.

That's not to say that there's anything wrong with looking at Twitter but this article plays into the use of Twitter as a hook because it's hot right now when it's the overall campaign supporting the return of a much loved individual after a multiyear absence that is the compelling story.

I guess if it bleeds tweets, it leads. But don't let such hype drive your marketing decisions unless you're going for coverage of your campaign. Clearly a somewhat effective Twitter effort can currently receive much more coverage than more successful efforts in other venues. And that's probably the biggest takeway from this AdAge article.

Update:
Had a brief email exchange with Charlie Moran, author of the AdAge piece, and he was quite nice about my rather harsh take on his article.  Very thoughtful guy and I see more clearly what he was up to though I think some points of disagreement remain.

However, I have been following Charlie for a bit.  In addition to periodic features at AdAge, you can check for his blog posts at Songs For Soap focusing on music and advertising.