Cyrus - Twitter Quitter

With recent reports showing that 75% of 16 to 25 year olds saying that they couldn’t live without the internet and 32% of the same age group agreeing with the statement: ‘I can access all the information I need online, there is no need to speak to a real person about my problems,’ there is a clear need to investigate how this desire for total net connectivity is changing their interactions. Face has already touched upon how Twitter is affecting brand interaction, with fluttering success. Youngsters are looking more towards the net for advice, while “traditional notions of expertise are in use. However, these now operate alongside more celebrity-based ideas of the professional”. With youth interaction between brands and celebrities blending through sites like Twitter, it might well be worth examining recent reactions to celebrity social media interaction.

The confluence between technology, brand and celebrity is shown by the recent survey that claims that the most admired celebrity entrepreneur by young people is Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple . While this says more for Apple’s branding than Steve Job’s Twitter interaction there is a sense that an interaction with technology and social media does affect the perception of brand and celebrity. The Beatles Playstation game, was the biggest selling of September and was responsible for the PS3 becoming the most sold console of that month. The Jonas Brothers are soon to begin their foray into videogames . The right kind of celebrity endorsement can even achieve credibility amongst the most hip and sneering of music sites as alternative breakcore/dancehall DJ /Rupture was name dropped in an episode of 90210. The worlds of brand and celebrities have clearly merged and young people’s interaction with them through media and technology is key to survival.

Some research has even suggested that celebrities are responsible for making the demographic of Twitter younger through publicized attempts to win the most followers. Celebrity has most certainly been one of the key phenomenons of Twitter with suggestions of ghostwriting and alike. In many ways Twitter has become an essential tool for celebrities to interact with their fans, the most savvy and down-to-earth of them such as Stephen Fry realizing that it heralds to some degree a new age of transparency which they must all navigate. This will be an on going theme as the internet increases in speed and complexity; the price for increased personalization will have to be transparency.

Top Youth Celebrities on Twitter, how would Soulja Boy, Ashley Tisdale, Pete Wentz or Taylor Swift make it on there without youth power?

As previously pointed out with brands, not all celebrities have a streamlined grasp of how to interact with this transparency. Being a teen-queen, Miley Cyrus’ quitting of Twitter two weeks ago caused a trending topic storm. The explanation she gave centred around advice from her rumoured boyfriend and the idea that she had “stopped living for moments and began living for people”. Newspaper’s put a doomsday clock on Twitter yet the use of Twitter beyond celebrities, to encounter serendipitous information surely far outweighs any celebrity endorsement anyway. What is particularly interesting is how she explained her departure through a youtube song could maybe hint at a desire for social media expression beyond 140 characters. Perhaps the total integration of much hype communication tool Google Wave will prove more effective in this respect. The post-hype suggests not though. It may just come down the old celeb adage that all she wants is more privacy and less interaction with her fans. This quitting of Twitter won’t affect her in the long, she is too bigger star and her main interaction is still through her music and TV shows, yet in this new world of equal communication would certainly damage a brand or a lesser celebrity should decide to end this new ventured transparency.

Although Miley Cyrus may have actually achieved a positive backlash through her quitting of Twitter, other celebrity-brands don’t quite transcend the leap from online to real-life aswell. Celebrities, like brands , really have to know what they’re getting into when they start using online tools, in order to use them properly. Many young people are using things like Twitter as a means to get closer to their favourite celebrities or brands, and in order to avoid backlashes that can harm perception celebrities must know themselves and how to use online tools effectively.