Just when it seemed there were no corners of the media world left for the celebrity-industrial complex to colonize, Twitter has gone celebrity-crazy.
As early adopters like Kevin Smith, Greg Grunberg, Lily Allen, LeVar Burton and of course, the First Couple of Twitterdom, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, have racked up followers, their tweets have created a new kind of aura: accessible, yet protected by the boundaries of cyberspace.
These stars understand the potential of the new medium to promote themselves without seeming self-promotional.
Fans, meanwhile, are scrambling to figure out which celebrities are worth following, helped by sites like Celebritytweet.com and feature articles like “25 Twitter Must-Follows.”
As BeBe Lerner, a publicist at ID-PR, put it, "Based on the amount of media attention they have received in the past few weeks, it seems like Twitter got a publicist.”
And the micro-blogging service is, by its very nature, changing the rules of the celebrity game in ways that publicists -- like the rest of us -- are being forced to adapt to.
For starters, there's the direct access fans have to celebrities via Twitter. For years now, celebrities have had to wall themselves off from their fans to protect their privacy -- if not their very lives. “Communication” came via strictly-publicist-approved entertainment journalism.
It’s become conventional wisdom that over-control by publicists has dealt a heavy, perhaps even fatal blow to entertainment journalism, a genre that once boasted classics like Gay Talese’s famous profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” but in recent years has become an embarrassing cookie-cutter form in which heavily guarded celebrities can be counted on to mouth mainly banalities.
But Twitter gives the impression of freshness and spontaneity to a star’s words.
One big factor is that on Twitter, anyone can ask a star questions. The star is free to be his or herself without fear of stalkers, protected by the “wall” of their Twitter account. They often answer fans’ questions, in a tweet that only the fan will understand, like this one from Jimmy Fallon to a fan who must have offered some point of criticism or suggestion to the “Late Night” host:
“@drinkosmosis they are cue cards. We use cue cards so that we can change it fast last minute. I see what you're saying … I'll work on it.” (For more stars' tweets, see accompanying story.)
Cute, right? It’s all part of the feeling that Twitter is a fun little cyber-village, its inhabitants all, somehow, friends.
But if you think that means the publicists have been sidelined, think again. Power publicists are striving to make their clients understand that their tweeting is not just some innocent personal expression.
The smarter celebrities are getting it, making their Twitter identities just one part of their overall media strategy -- which means, inevitably, that it’s controlled to some degree by their publicity team.
Britney Spears’ Twitter is an extreme example: Some tweets are attributed to “Adam Leber, Manager,” some to “Brit” herself. Some look like ads for Spears’ website: “Photos of Britney and her dancers at Tribe Hyperclub in Montreal.
