BIG BIRD IS TINY!!!!! investigative journalism in the sesame street twitter space
or, an article i wrote four years ago
DID YOU HEAR????? THE NEWS????? BIG BIRD IS TINY!!!!!
For days, Twitter has been gripped by an unthinkable saga: Big Bird is tiny.
The thing about Sesame Street Twitter is that it rocks. The Count counts. Oscar grouches. The rest of em…do bits. The accounts for the puppet residents of Sesame Street go viral more often than you can imagine, and have been doing so for years.
In fact, back in 2018, I pitched a write-up, or analysis, of their greatest hits. But the editor I’d contacted said I needed to do some original reporting, get in touch with the people at Sesame who ran the accounts. Which I tried to do, but never heard back…until, in late 2019, when Sesame Street was celebrating its 50th anniversary, and I got a PR email about that, and used it to secure an interview with the people who run the accounts, which I ended up conducting in early 2020. I got back in touch with the editor and we went through a few drafts of the piece before he decided he didn’t want it and paid me a “kill fee,” and, well, these things happen in freelance life.
But!!! I’ve always maintained that SOMEONE should acknowledge the good work of the Sesame Street Twitter accounts! Long after most “gimmick” accounts have died, and almost all brands can only go viral if they’re getting dunked on, people are happy to interact with Grover, Elmo and the like as if they are who they appear to be. Grown adults quote-tweeting Bert and Ernie. Surprisingly wholesome on an increasingly toxic website.
And so, to commemorate the great Big Bird Is Tiny episode of 2024 (which to be fair could just be the lead-up to some announcement of a tiny new show or something), I present below my resurrected, long-lost article, in its original form.
But before you read it, I just want to say, again, I wrote this four years ago and it never got to the “finished” stage so some of the prose is “mid” but I’m not editing it now due to…transparency? Yes, transparency in journalism.
How The Residents Of Sesame Street Became The Best Part Of Twitter
By Lizzie Logan
After spending the better part of the last ten years lost in the infinite abyss of Twitter, I can confidently report that the best branded accounts belong to Sesame Street. On a site teeming with faceless corporate entities, meme-obsessed fast food companies, and at least one federal agency that tweets out quasi-shitposts, the Sesame Street team has done something truly radical: created accounts that are genuinely funny, true to the voices of the characters, and completely irony-free. It’s a miracle.
As Sesame Street celebrated its 50th anniversary this fall with a social media takeover of the @instagram handle, new GIF collections on Giphy, special Snapchat features, and a Twitter Q&A video, I spoke with chief marketing officer Samantha Maltin and senior social media manager Victoria Rihl to find out the secrets behind their success. Warning: If a preschooler with highly advanced reading comprehension skills is looking over your shoulder, close this article now. As with Santa delivering presents and the Tooth Fairy collecting teeth, it’s best to let the illusion of Elmo operating his own Twitter account play out a little longer.
@CountVonCount, @elmo and @BigBird joined Twitter in 2012 with the other six accounts (@bertsesame, @MeCookieMonster, @SesameErnie, @AbbyCadabbySST, @Grover, @OscarTheGrouch) coming online in 2014. In early 2015, Oscar The Grouch, who in early 2015 seized on the Academy Awards chatter to say scram! to the ceremony that bears his name, and the crossbred fruit of online pop culture and Sesame Street sweetness was born.
I’ll note here that the video parodies you see on social media are a slightly larger team effort. Maltin explained, “I have a brand marketing and a brand creative team and they work very closely on creative, so when you see things that are sound and motion, they’re always involved.” The Westworld and Game of Thrones parodies, and the video of Cookie Monster interviewing Brian Cox from Succession are a “wink and a nod to the adults,” and they’re also, of course, cross-promotion for other HBO shows. Twitter is its own thing. Zeitgeist ground zero.
Maltin said, “It’s very opportunistic. Twitter is where things happen, it’s usually where everything originates. So we keep our eye on everything that’s happening in pop culture and try and tap into trends and let our characters have a voice. This is the one platform where we can be less promotional and let the characters be more authentic.” On Instagram (and now TikTok), there’s one account for all of Sesame, but on Twitter, the characters get their own handles.
Like residents of a real neighborhood, the Sesame Streeters all talk (or tweet) a little differently: Upbeat Big Bird and Abby Cadabby are loyal brand ambassadors; adventurous Elmo and Grover post pictures from their travels; roommates Bert and Ernie mostly tweet at each other. Oscar, being a grouch who lives in trash, is a natural Twitter user, calmly tweeting out droll nonsequiturs like “nope, not today.” The most popular is Cookie Monster, an absolute master of branding who simply adds cookies to the trending topic of the wee. His Lizzo lyric went unexpectedly viral, surprising both the Internet and Maltin.
My personal favorite is @CountVonCount, who counts his tweets … and that’s all he does. Ah ah ah! Sticking to his niche!
Despite their separate shticks, all of the accounts are run by the same woman: Victoria Rihl. “She spends every moment with our production team and the writers and really has started to channel their voices. She spends time with the puppeteers, she knows them so well, and for as many people are involved in the production, the characters, she does a great job of channeling, what would Oscar say, what would Cookie do in this moment?” said Maltin of Rihl.
She’s so tuned in, in fact, that Rihl admitted, “Once in a while, I’ll be emailing a colleague and I’ll write ‘me’ instead of ‘my’ — still in that Cookie Monster headspace!” But she also added, “I can’t take credit for the characters’ iconic voices. They’ve been developed over the last 50 years by Sesame Street’s puppeteers and writers, and sticking close to that is what really helps the characters come alive online.”
The key is that at Sesame, they aren’t aiming for clever, they’re aiming for happy: “Twitter isn’t always the most positive environment, so we do try and keep it fun and light. We love when we hear comments from our audience like, ‘This made me laugh out loud!’ or ‘This put a smile on my face.’ That’s exactly what we’re trying to do,” Maltin said. “We’re very positive, we’re very optimistic, we really try and find the good in everything.”
When I trollingly asked if I’d be able to goad Elmo into a flame war, Maltin responded, “No, we just won’t go there. You can try! But we just won’t go there.” Rihl, who operates the accounts day-to-day, told me in an email that the Sesame-related accounts “get surprisingly few trolls,” and a quick glance at any of the feeds proves it. A lot of the responses are jokey, but they’re almost all kind. As Maltin told me, “How can you not smile with Cookie Monster?”
The overarching ethos is kindness, but as with anything on the Internet, it’s also about being #relatable. “We keep the characters’ posts relatable. I think that’s why people respond so well to them. Bert and Ernie’s interactions are popular, for example, because everyone seems to have that one wacky roommate or over-the-top (but lovable!) friend,” Rihl wrote. “Cookie Monster is definitely my favorite to tweet for. He’s so relatable, and his unique (often cookie-based) sense of humor lets me tap into the latest jokes and trends in a natural way.”
Even when the artifice is exposed, it’s all part of the charm. “I once tweeted a photo of Cookie Monster’s camera roll --- it was all pictures of cookies, obviously --- someone tweeted Cookie back to say, ‘Someone seriously saved 28 pictures of cookies on their phone for this tweet, and they’re my hero,’” Rihl recalled. “That comment made it all worthwhile.”
The pop culture jokes and memes are for adults, but the voices and personalities remain squarely kid-friendly, to the point that they won’t even do a little quid pro quo. When I, ever the self-promoter, asked if Big Bird could tweet this article, Rihl sweetly responded, “Ha! Big Bird usually sticks to tweeting about birdseed milkshakes.”