What I first have to say is “Wow!” I must be one of the most naïve people in the whole world. I had no idea how much social networking sites were being used for promotion. I mean, I knew that Barack used these sites throughout his campaign, but I never really made the leap to actors and musicians. I guess it only makes sense. Why wouldn’t you use the popular social media to promote both you and your celebrity, if you do happen to be a celebrity?
In my defense, I do have a Facebook account, a MySpace page, and a twitter account, but let me tell you how little I delve into each of them. Lets start with the latter. While I do have a twitter account, I have never tweeted. In fact, I have never read or followed anyone else’s tweets. I signed up for the account during my last Masters course with Rick Beach. My husband, on the other hand, uses his Twitter account daily. So, for this assignment I gave myself over to the expert to find out more about this exciting new social medium.
He gave me a run down of how it works. How people can post small status updates quite often. To me, that sounded a lot like what occurs on Facebook. But, the benefit of Twitter is that it is only the statuses without all the other annoying Farmville and Mafia Wars updates. My husband doesn’t follow a lot of celebrities. I think he does follow Joel McHale, but he is an anomaly. Being that he works at the state capitol, he mainly follows legislators and news media. He says that Twitter is an invaluable tool for knowing what is going on in the world of politics. He continues to say that if a reporter has a fact, they typically tweet it before they write the story.
Last night, I asked him about the celebrity postings and how he knows that they are truly posted by the celebrity. He said he didn’t know. He did not seem to care too much about if it was really Joel McHale or his publicist. He did say that most of the post sounded like McHale himself. I talked with him about what I learned in the reading regarding Mariah Carey and Brittney Spears using first and third person to distinguish between their true selves and their publicist. We both found that extremely interesting.
The same cannot be said for Facebook, however. I log on to Facebook multiple times a day. I do not believe, however, that I use this site in the same manner as most of the people (at least most of the younger generation) do. Again, my main reason for signing up was to keep in contact with a friend who moved over seas. If he had not left, I am unsure if I would have entered the Facebook realm. I typically use Facebook as another email. I sign in, check the home page, look at my profile, see if I have any new invites/requests, and sometimes play a game.
Up until two days ago I had never searched for people or organizations outside my realm of friends. I didn’t really know that different organizations had pages, but now I do and I am interested in looking up some Facebook pages that would be beneficial to my teaching career. I love the idea that there are other teachers out there that I can hook up with and exchange ideas with. And while I knew that celebrities had Facebook pages, I didn’t really care about them. They’re not my friends.
After reading Celebrity Studies: The promotion and presentation of the self: celebrity as a marker of presentational media by P. David Marshall, I was highly motivated to do some research on the issue of using social networking sites as a was to promote both the self and the performer. I know we talked earlier about how an authentic performer would not separate these two halves of the whole, but I think believed it to be different in the case of the online self.
I would imagine that in the online self, artists are going to show a more intimate side of themselves. I do not believe all of them will go as far as Ashton Kutcher and post pictures of their wives in underwear, but they will still show us some glimpse into their personal life.
One reason I believe that artists and performers would want to do this is because they control the message that gets sent out. This is most definitely not the case in most of the media coverage they get. Usually the paparazzi and other media sites choose what to report, and in turn, how they are represented or come across. By using sites like Facebook and Twitter, the artists cannot represent themselves in the way they see fit. While this may still be a performance, albeit not on a stage, we (their audience) still see this as a more intimate view.
When choosing a celebrity to research I went to Facebook first. I clicked on the music section and scrolled through the artists that have sites dedicated to them. I did not have an opinion on who I wanted to see, so I ended up looking at multiple peoples’ and groups’ sites.
Early in the research, I came up with a hypothesis I wanted to test. It came to me, after looking at Mariah Carey, Brittney Spears, and the band The Killers, that it seemed like it was easier to determine if the posts were actual posts from the artists themselves or their publicist if it was a site dedicated to one person rather than a group. This led me to believe that most single person sites were more intimate in nature than the band sites.
Taking this as my hypothesis, I dug a little deeper and looked at more celebrity Facebook pages. I started by looking at some band sites. For this I examined The Black Eyed Peas, Maroon5, and Weezer. While I know that this is a small sample size, I think the point gets across. After scrolling down and reading a multitude of posts on each of these band’s sites, I noticed a trend in what was uploaded to these particular sites. All that was posted were news pieces on each of these artists, tour dates, and their music, along with other promotional materials. There was never an intimate or more telling post. Even when the band tried to make it more intimate, it was still promotional. This can be seen in Weezer’s post of “Are you ready for Bonnaroo? Share some pics of your camping gear”. I feel that they were trying to make it sound like it was the members posting this, but it was still really all about promotion and telling their fans that they would be at Bonnaroo.
One band site that leaned more into the intimate realm was that of Tapes ‘n Tapes. While their posts were mostly made up of tour dates, I did notice that they took the time to answer some of their fans’ posts.
Shane C Mutter Are you guys ever coming to New Orleans? What the hell? June 3 at 8:30pm
we hope so. it's been at #1 on our list of "cities we haven't played in yet, but want to" for a while. we're trying....guess we'll just have to try a little harder, though.
June 3 at 8:47pm
Glad to hear. Well keep me posted and I'll keep my fingers crossed. My brother, cousin, and a few friends have been following you guys for a few years.
June 4 at 7:19am
I feel that this really lends to the authenticity of these posts. And it makes me feel that they care about their fans and their fans’ desires and wishes.
So, now onto the single artists’ pages, where I expected it to reflect a more intimate relationship with the audience based on the types of posts I would find. Instead, I found that this isn’t really the case. I have found examples of single artist Facebook pages that are very much not intimate. The pages I looked at were Jay-Z, Michael Buble, and Celine Dion. None of these artists posted anything that I would declare truly from them rather than from their publicist. It was still all about the tour dates and promotion.
This makes me wonder then, why do some artists take the time to post materials themselves while others don’t? What is it about Brittney Spears or Mariah Carey, or even Joel McHale that makes them want to have that more personal connection? Unfortunately, I don’t have the resources or time to answer this question, but I hope that someday someone will.
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