Last night’s Daily Show included a joke about Jon Stewart’s alter Twitter ego GayObama – a Twitter account that at the time had six tweets and zero friends. That changed quickly. Within minutes of the mention the account started accumulating buddies faster than the lone dancer at the 2009 Sasquatch Festival. I was number 17 – GayObama not Sasquatch, and at the time of the posting the account had around 9,000 friends.

The slide show below shows screen grabs of the account growing complete with time stamps.

It’s a testament to a lot of things – Stewart and the show’s popularity obviously (along Stephen Colbert’s), but more importantly how dialed into social media their viewership is, and how easily they can be mobilized. This should come as no surprise after the success of their “Rally to Restore Sanity” last October. But if you compare this to a similar Twitter spike about a month ago – when Kim and Kourtney Kardashian endorsed Piers Morgan, GayObama’s rise to prominence is even more impressive.

The Kardashian hold the 6th and 72nd largest followings respectively with Kim’s following equal to the President’s (real Obama not GayObama), and at the time Morgan was no slouch either with over 200,000 followers. So it’s no surprise that the Kardashian bump gave Morgan a 4,500 fan infusion over a few hours. GayObama managed to match that in the same amount of time and in 12 hours double it – for a fictitious character, with only 6 tweets and zero recent updates, in 12 hours! Not a well known television personality with hundreds of thousand followers that regular updates, but for GayObama! In the time it took me to write this he’s already gained 225 more! Sure we can argue all day about how the situations were completely different but in the end it’s pretty impressive stuff.

The obvious question from marketers (or at least for me) is how can that rabid army of easily activated Gen-Yers be mobilized for my brand? In my opinion the reason why it’s so easy for Stewart to have that effect is the same reason it’s difficult for brands to leverage it – authenticity. Stewart was recently ranked America’s most trusted newsman and it’s the product of being relatively nonpartisan, noncorporate, and nonbullshit. We’ll follow him, and support him, because we know he doesn’t sellout – while Kim and Kourtney will Tweet the virtues of the Third Reich if you write a big enough check.

That’s not to say they can’t be leveraged by a clever brand willing to be creative. Case in point was Miracle Whip’s reaction in 2009 when Colbert rebuked their IN YOUR FACE ad campaign by starting a Mayo-lution.

Miracle Whip quickly responded by issuing a proclamation against Colbert with full page ads in several papers and buying out ad space on the show. Both sides claimed it was spontaneous and unplanned, but regardless if it was cooked up in a pitch or done on the fly, it was a clever and adaptive way to leverage the personality without diminishing their authenticity.

We’ll see if last night’s display will move more marketers to think more GayObamaly – who by the way is now up to 9,500, and counting.