Do Twit Twitty Stars Really Tweet On Twitter? - Page 2
Those were 50 Cent’s words, but it was not exactly him tweeting. Rather, it was Chris Romero, known as Broadway, the director of the rapper’s Web empire, who typed in those words after reading them in an interview.
“He doesn’t actually use Twitter,” Mr. Romero said of 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson III, “but the energy of it is all him.” [...]
[S]omeone has to do all that writing, even if each entry is barely a sentence long. In many cases, celebrities and their handlers have turned to outside writers — ghost Twitterers, if you will — who keep fans updated on the latest twists and turns, often in the star’s own voice.
Because Twitter is seen as an intimate link between celebrities and their fans, many performers are not willing to divulge the help they use to put their thoughts into cyberspace.
Britney Spears recently advertised for someone to help, among other things, create content for Twitter and Facebook. Kanye West recently told New York magazine that he has hired two people to update his blog. “It’s just like how a designer would work,” he said.
It is not only celebrities who are forced to look to a team to produce real-time commentary on daily activities; politicians like Ron Paul have assigned staff members to create Twitter posts and Facebook personas. Candidate Barack Obama, as well as President Obama, has a social-networking team to keep his Twitter feed tweeting.
The famous, of course, have turned to ghostwriters for autobiographies and other acts of self-aggrandizement. But the idea of having someone else write continual updates of one’s daily life seems slightly absurd.
Yes, I can see that a celeb needs marketing; these sorts of social networking sites plays right into that because they are easy and hip ways of reaching the unwashed masses, for I would guess that more people probably Twitter or MySpace than buy tickets to concerts or fan magazines. Plus, I'm sure it's a great way for some self-important stars to get their ego stroked in real-time, because fawning sycophants and screaming fans can sometimes be ambiguous.
But I'm gratified to see that I'm not the only one who finds the whole idea of ghost-Twitterers kind of stupid. I guess if you don't look at someone as a person but rather as a commodity...uh...yeah, it still seems kind of stupid:
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