Social Cache.
A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

Stars Love Twitter

Did you know (or care) that Martha Stewart is on Twitter? Currently, she has over 200,000 followers, including Jane Fonda and Michael Phelps. In return, she follows P. Diddy and Snoop Dogg (who refers to Twitter as “twizzle”).

Other famous tweeters include Trent Reznor, Courtney Love, Shaq, Ashton Kutcher, John Mayer, Yoko Ono, Al Gore and Demi Moore.

When celebrities join Twitter, it lends a sense of credibility and authenticity to their brand. And more importantly, they’re generating a constant stream of free publicity with the ability to set the record straight when something unflattering arises.

Fans love tuning in to hear random tidbits from idols’ their daily lives such as when Martha tweeted on March 4th that she had just dined out with Ludacris. According to her, “he loved lunch–esp. the choc cake.”

Of course, there is always a potential downside when a celebrity is allowed to run free with technology away from the watchful eyes of their publicists. Recently, Beyoncé’s little sis Solange Knowles sent out erratic messages to her thousands of followers, only to follow up with a tweet the next day, wondering how she had ended up in the hospital.

Fans prefer the real thing, even when it’s a train wreck in progress. One of Courtney Love’s recent tweets was as dramatic as ever; “THIS MOVE HAS BEEN A TRAGEDY. THIS HOUSE IS CHAOS BEYOND WHAT I COULD HAVE IMAGINED, SOMEONE THREW OUT A HUGELY EXPENSIVE PIECE OF ART!”

While most celebrities compose their own tweets, there’s a handful that hand off the task to their staff, including 50 Cent. His 230,000 followers weren’t impressed when they learned that he has his “web guy” write and post for him. Though, there’s no need to get angry since “the energy of it is all him.” On the temptation of hiring someone else to tweet for him, Shaquille O’Neal nailed the general consensus by saying that “It’s 140 characters. It’s so few characters. If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you.”

If you really can’t get enough of celebrities on Twitter, Celebrity Tweet (complete with the too-obvious tagline “Stalk Celebrities on Twitter!”) provides a real-time feed of their tweets.

Not surprisingly, Twitter really has become a self-induced stalker’s paradise.

Nemo’s Creative Director Mark Lewman and me were riffing on his idea of how a company’s work and overall business can be validated in an era of Google, YouTube, Wikipedia and radical transparency et al. The bottom line that we seemed to arrive at is that it is not good enough to deliver good work these days – anyone can do good work. The task at hand is to be trusted to create amazing work and then, when your amazing work is discovered, fame will surely follow.

Here’s Mark’s distilled thoughts so far:
Success in the 21st century means finding balance between two timeless elements Trust and Fame. Your work is who you are. This is the part of the equation you control. To stand out today, everything you do must be awesome. When people encounter what you produce they must find substance and excellence. Just because an idea can be relied upon as great doesn’t mean it automatically wins. It isn’t complete until it has believers; distribution and exposure make an idea stronger and add value through cultural validation. As trust and reliability grows so should the fame.

Jeff Jarvis provides an extension of these thoughts when he writes on Buzzmachine – “All content must be transparent: open on the web with permanent links so it can receive links. It’s not content until it’s linked.”

And then, looking beyond transparency at the barriers to creative expression and its dissemination, it is worth remembering this point that Jarvis recounts elsewhere in ‘The Myth of the Creative Class‘ after he has reconsidered his views on copyright law and realizes that a too stringent application of copyright infringement can stifle the spread of what has been created – “when creations are restricted it is the creator who suffers more because his creation won’t find its full and true public, its spark finds no kindling, and the fire dies. The creative class, copyright, mass media, and curmudgeonly critics stop what should be a continuing process of creation; like reverse alchemists, they turn abundance into scarcity, gold into lead.”