By Eva-Jeanette Rawlins
We all know that Twitter is a marketer’s dream. Who would have known a few years back that in 2012 a celebrity’s public relations strategy would entail typing a sentence about where they just picked their nose, and as a result gain a couple hundred new fans.
Miles sanguinetti/VANGUARD STAFF
They now gauge their popularity almost entirely by the twittering of their tweeting followers, and they’d be twits not to.
The money is literally at their fingertips.
Recently, though, it’s been getting ridiculous, even by Twitter standards. Forget simply using the social medium to get your name out there—that’s old news. Now it’s all about tarnishing someone else’s name or, even better, doing damage control and trying to clean up your own.
Celebrities are now taking to Twitter in droves to apologize for cheating on their significant others, the most recent example being Jason Aldean—and who could forget the Stewart/Pattinson phenomenon? Has it really come to this? That the act of asking for forgiveness is now achieved by typing “:(”?
First of all, it’s insulting that they even think I care, but that argument holds little credence, because the fact is that millions do care.
The lives of countless “Team Edward” fans hung in the balance upon Stewart’s admission of her “momentary indiscretion,” and within minutes—literally—the Twittersphere roared with homicidal reactions.
It seems as though we have heralded a whole new era of cyber-confessing, and there’s little doubt that we will live in a future of tweeted declarations of iniquity.
Aldean obviously thought it effective. After being photographed in a compromising position with former American Idol contestant Brittany Kerr—let’s just say he wasn’t gazing into her eyes—the married country music star knew exactly what he needed to do to make things right: Tweet.
“The truth is that I screwed up,” were his meaningful words. “I had too much to drink, let the party get out of hand and acted inappropriately.”
Too bad he didn’t think there was anything inappropriate about his apology. Perfect country song lyrics, though.
It’s really disturbing that somebody’s first instinct after having been caught cheating is to let fans know how their marriage is going by writing a well-crafted sentence in a 140 characters or less.
Spending less time on the Internet and more with the person you claim to have devastated might be the smarter move. But it seems it’s more important to control the damage to your reputation.
Unless you’re Nicki Minaj, that is. As they say, “any press is good press,” and boy, is American Idol lucky they’ve got someone so willing to oblige.
Twitter is very handy for mudslinging—now, along with apologies, we can enjoy well-articulated celebrity fights.
Minaj’s most recent tirade against cohost Mariah Carey explained: “I don’t call tmz n Barbara Walters cuz I stand on my own two feet…God is good…I guess it hurts 2 have the producers tell u to ur face that nicki is the best judge…Awww, poor u.”
Nothing like wielding the Lord’s name mid-insult to drive your point home.
When celebrities have nothing better to do than provide us with typed play-by-plays on their relationships or engage in real or not-so-real cyber-fights, it makes me wonder where social media is headed and if relating with each other—humanly, that is—will
become a thing of the past.
If marketing yourself has reached such depths that it now means humiliating your significant other with a pathetic string of apologies or embarrassing yourself with grammatically inferior character assassination, then it’s official: The value of human beings is fast being replaced by bluebird signs, not heartbeats.