Mad Money answers our Cruise Line Investment Tweet

Last Monday, I was on the treadmill at the gym when I saw that Jim Cramer & CNBC’s Mad Money was answering investment related tweets live on the air.

Being the cruise geek that I am, I thought ‘how cool would it be if while I’m here running that my tweet is answered live on the TV’. So, I quickly tweeted this:

Hey @jimcramer, what is your thoughts on the cruiselines? #RCL #CCL #madtweets

After 20 minutes, Mad Money goes off without responding to my question. No big deal, he was getting hundreds of tweets.  I don’t think twice about it. 

3 days later, on Thursday evening, I receive a Tweet from good friend @DerekHernquist letting me know Jim Cramer on Mad Money spent 10 minutes answering my question about the cruise lines.

If you’re interested in potentially investing in Carnival or Royal Caribbean stock or want to watch a good example of “Social TV”, here is the video:

My thoughts on Mad Money’s use of social media:

It was extremely cool that they used my tweet to drive the content for a full segment of Mad Money.  And they gave me props with a big Booyah! for tweeting the question.

Reality TV shows like ‘The Voice’ have been displaying live tweets for a while.  But using a Tweet or Facebook question to drive actual content takes interactive TV to the next level.  It shows the entire audience you care about your Twitter followers enough to fully take the time to answer their questions.

We’ve been using Tweets and Facebook questions to drive many of our blog posts on the CruiseSource for at least 2 years.  Here is an example where CruiseDeals a question on Facebook about what is included in the price of a cruise, and it was fully answered in a blog post: Click to read post.

I believe we will see more news content being driven from Twitter and Facebook as we move closer to TV 2.0.   It makes life easy on writers and producers.  Your audience is telling you on Twitter what they want to know more about and give you ideas for your show for FREE.  You just have to listen!

Where did Mad Money fail? So they took all this time [hours] to research and write a 10 minute segment for their show. They did not send me a tweet to let me know they will be answering it on the air. I guess they assumed that I would be watching 3 night later… maybe surprise me? But, I was lucky that a friend saw it and let me know about it. I believe they should have taken the 15 seconds to send me a follow-up tweet.

Author Note: @RichTucker is the founder/editor of CruiseSource and the winner of the 2009 Shorty Award for providing the best Travel Content on Twitter.