The real Slim Shady is back. We almost forgot all about Eminem and all his drama but now he’s releasing his first album in the last five years, “The Relapse.”

We all knew it would happen eventually but I wasn’t expecting Eminem to build buzz so well.  The marketing team at Aftermath/Interscope Records has created a cool campaign to reintroduce the hip-hop star. You can read about the full campaign here. It’s cool to see that Eminem is marketing his album the same way big studios market new movie releases.

So far, the campaign is working. Twitter has been their main online outlet so far and within the last couple days Tweeters have been going crazy for the new campaign. There has also been a major spike in Eminem Google searches, comparable to the Google inquiries for his 2004 album.

Here are the official stats so far:

“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.”

Not too shabby.

Going back to the Google trends, the spike at the very end of the graph is a result of the ticket giveaway for his Detroit show. So far, this has been the only giveaway in the campaign, which surprises me. That could be because I just read an article about how successful Radiohead’s name-your-own-price promotion was in 2007. Eminem’s market are those who are most likely to pirate music. The album has already been leaked online, so it would have made sense for Eminem to make his campaign cater to that audience. Considering the success of his past albums, doing something similar to Radiohead would have definitely been doable.

But you know what? I’m just glad Eminem is back and well, despite his stint with prescription drug abuse. And we’re glad to see him harnessing the power of social media.

Recently Nielsen reported that about 60% of Twitter users do not return to the site after the first month. They said that with only a 40% retention rate, the site could not sustain itself. The funny this is despite the alleged low retention rate, you can’t go anywhere without hearing about Twitter.

While people were surprised and freaking out about Twitter’s low numbers, it seemed totally normal to me. I’d take 40% any day. I was sure that other social networks had similar retention rates. Turned out I was wrong. At this point, Facebook‘s and Myspace‘s retention rates were about double that of Twitter’s.

Then Brendan O’Connell brought up a good point:

@andybeal I don’t think Nielsen considered Twitter apps access http://bit.ly/TdT7r

I was sure this was going to clear up the whole mess. It made sense to me; my Twitter time is spent on Twhirl. I rarely log into Twitter anymore. It turns out that Nielsen hadn’t considered Twitter applications. Yes! Victory was mine!

However, my victory was short lived when Nielsen reported that with the outside Twitter applications, the retention rate was still about 40%.

So it turns out that all of my well-wishing for Twitter’s retention was in vain. However, I really don’t think they’re in trouble. Those who continue to use Twitter after the first month are those who are hopelessly addicted. They don’t know why they are there or why they feel the need to update people on everything they’re doing, but it must be done. I have a feeling those fans aren’t going to peace-out any time soon.

I mentioned that Twitter had about half the retention rate of Facebook and Myspace. Here’s the thing, Facebook and Myspace are the most successful social networks ever. It’s actually amazing that Twitter is able to have the amount of repeat users as it does. So I don’t think we should be sending our condolences to Twitter for their small numbers; we should be congratulating them for their success.

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• Proof That Nielsen is Wrong; Twitter’s Retention Rate is Not 40% (marketingpilgrim.com)