I’ve been spending a lot of time with my new friend Jane Fonda, who is all over the place these days as she gets ready for her first Broadway show in 46 years, “33 Variations.”
One day recently, Jane twittered me -- me! -- about her new unctuously headlined press release, which was largely about a "social media evangelist" (his wording) named James Andrews.
Now La Fonda has started to “follow” me on Twitter. So I know her middle name is Seymour and that she thinks about her Dad a lot, particularly backstage while she’s readying to star in the new vehicle.
But then I see these same comments in printed interviews, too, and I am starting to wonder... Am I being hoodwinked?
Jane, is it really you out there?
Stars cannot just show up online and expect to succeed. It takes work! Social media means getting to know someone—not faking it like celebrities always do.
The idea of social media types helping stars infiltrate the Twitterati is probably what we’ll be dealing with for years to come. You’ve got to figure that the smarty-pants who can put their thoughts (or someone else’s) on the Web plan to make a lot of money with celebs. Take the dude who works for Britney Spears, who posted an ad online recently asking for someone to “handle all social media aspects” of her life.
Granted, sometimes the messages seem like the actual senders’: Shaq tweeting obliquely “any 1 touches me say yur twit gets 2 tickets… gotta touch my right shoulder!” Or Lance telling us “OMFG, my bike got stolen.”
No doubt publicists are going nuts having to compete with a social media warts-and-all world.
But alas, that’s where we are, watching stars (or their social mediators) tell us things we really do not want to know (“Seymour?”) and making us wonder if Ashton Kutcher is as dumb as he seems on his blog. (That's not possible. Is it?)
Whether they participate directly or not, social media is only the latest in a long list of online attention-getting vehicles for stars. (Lest you forget, stars are actors -- so which one of them are you dealing with at any time? And celebrities are being looked at all the time. They get used to it. I hasten to add, most crave it.)
I remember how a few years ago, the dude from semi-successful regulation pop band Fall Out Boy went for the attention button and pretended that a friend took a picture of the FOB’s penis (don’t ask what he was doing to get the shot) and sent it around on the Web. A lot of us PR kinds watched with sideways glee. Would this stunt blow up in the FOB’s, er, face? But it did not. He married Jessica Simpson’s sister and now hosts VH-1 shows. I don’t think he’s in the band full-time now!
Since those days, it seems a lot of stars who used to show up crapped out at parties to get attention (Tara? You listening?) simply send an emissary online to rant and get play for giving away “secrets.”
Gee whiz, Nicole Richie is pregnant! So her husband “Joel” told us on his weekly podcast. Oh look, there’s an Oscar winner talking about how heavy the award is on her Plurk feed. The social media evangelists sure know how to work us.
And yet, back to Jane. I’m sure that guy on the press release will be upset to hear someone has figured out that we’re being played -- or is it that she’s being played by him? It’s all kind of awkward and confusing.
In the end, it does not matter, because Jane is back and she’s a treasure. I know Ted Turner misses her a lot, while he tours the country these days in support of his new and expensive autobiography.
How can I be sure? He mentioned it on a post a couple of seconds ago.
I’m in a PR class currently and we’re studying the use of twitter and facebook in PR. I know a few girls that wouldn’t matter being the social media avatar of Lindsay, Rihanna or Hillary Duff. The case is sad and absolutely expected. I’ve read more than an interview of a celebrity saying I don’t have a facebook account, because of privacy issues. Funny, they’re right. In my own country, Venezuela, celebrities are not that "digitally" unreachable. Thus, you can find websites with bikini pictures stolen from facebook or hi5.
In the end, they shouldn’t even do it, as they shouldn’t go on twitter “being friends” with people and developing those expectations. Keep it real, should be the least we expect from the new social media.
Please do not waste on your time on Twitter and the rest of its ilk.I will never forget the kindof stares I got at work for Banning access to Twitter and the rest of its gang.
But the fact remains that they are nothing but a waste of time(especially company time),with NEGATIVE RETURNS.
For the sake of your sanity,dont use Twitter and the rest of them idiotic Social Networking tools.
Well. I'm hurt. I was CERTAIN that Jane sent that info about her middle name just to me. To know that she sent it out to the general ether AND in interviews, well, I guess I'm a little disillusioned now.
Actually, my concern about Twitter and Facebook is that the focus of communication (whether by celebrities or curmudgeons like me) has changed from one on one communication to one on many.
Telling a naughty little secret to a friend (ONE friend) is confession. Telling it to the world is exhibitionism.
That's an excellent point. Personally, I tend to distinguish business success and social welfare (although the former is included in the latter).
From my point of view, I see twitter as a platform that provides open acceess to a basic conduit (in this case the huge volume of standard text 140 char messages containing diverse information). In my mind, this is a great analogy with the open access debate on broadband (more specifically fiber) access networks. In a similar reasoning, ISPs access to dark fiber and ducts of a physical infrastructure provider can enable a thriving broadband services ecosystem.
In general, open access to a principal asset (call it dark fiber, information in short messages, user data records - see Facebook, Call detail records - google for Telco2.0, etc) has strong potential to encourage innovation on the service layer and help market to leverage on innovation dynamics, which in any other form of market structure (ie less horizontal, more vertical) would be significantly less.
Like Terry, I still am a skeptic (from the business value perspective), but this article is indeed interesting. The idea of an ecosystem of services that are really just features growing up around a simple self-promoting social network service intrigues me.
Does this become the new incarnation of a "killer app?" We measure the value of a new service by the utilities that grow in the ecosystem to support it? Even if the original service is relatively short-lived in it's initial incarnation, can the ecosystem sustain it? Instead of Twitter going on a buying spree--could one of these emerging services built on tweets be the acquirer, not the acquiree?
We may be seeing the beginnings of a new business model, based on a service that most of us say (including me) has no perceived business value other than promotional--which drives the behaviors discussed in the original post--paid PR folks tweeting for us--and away from the very social network aim of the service.
I think Terry might be thinking I need a bigger shovel right now.
The discussion on twitter is heating up! And it seems that as soon as a discussion turns to social media we end up talking about twitter. Here's an interesting article that I found on GigaOm that refers to a number of utilities enabling you to harvest the "knowledge" tweeted away (to quote the site's editor!)
Although I haven't signed up on Twitter yet, I have to agree that I think the value is just passing information. I think if done right, it could be excelent "free advertising".
In re "He was sure there is a business pony in there somewhere..." is as concise a summary of my own attitude toward Twitter as a business tool as I've seen. All that information and a highly energized user base aren't delivering much tangible value oir return -- not writing off Twitter here, just waiting patiently for a more compelling logic.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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