Celebrity Twitter Tip: Avoid Having Your Feelings Hurt By Ignoring Replies And Mentions

Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 8:30 am

If you're new here, you may want to check out the archives. You can also subscribe to my RSS feed, or follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

I don’t watch The Hills, and I have no idea who Stephanie Pratt is. Earlier today, I (somehow) stumbled across a conversation between Stephanie and another Twitter user. Stephanie was being pressed as to why she only seemed to reply to ‘other famous people’, and she volunteered this response.

Outstanding prose aside, this is actually a somewhat enlightening statement. I’ve speculated before about how the ‘real world’ interaction that celebrities on Twitter are now facing with the public is something that many of them would not in any way have been prepared for, and the departure of such luminaries as Miley Cyrus and Lily Allen over the past few weeks underlines this.

And while on one hand you can absolutely understand Stephanie’s reluctance to delve into the murky waters of her replies and mentions folder – there are a lot of strange characters out there, after all – to deliberately avoid these communications (unless one is feeling really, really brave) essentially puts a thick black line through the words social media and replaces them with soapbox.

It’s a two-way mechanism, folks, and not one that’s just limited to the proles. Either embrace social media and learn to deal with the weirdos and stalkers (and master the block) or hand control over to your PR team. The latter is a complete fail too, of course (I’m looking at you Amy Winehouse and Tom Cruise), but it’s a heck of a lot better than intentionally ignoring us.

If you enjoyed this article, please share it!

Related posts:

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!

2 Comments

DeAnna Troupe says:

November 1, 2009 at 4:29 am

I totally agree with you on this point. That’s why I don’t even follow celebrities anymore. I’d much rather follow someone who is going to actually interact with me. It defeats the purpose of having a social media account in the first place if you’re not going to interact with the people.
DeAnna Troupe´s last blog ..Cross Blog Conversation with The Carlton Zone

Reply
Rooker says:

November 10, 2009 at 8:19 pm

Either embrace social media and learn to deal with the weirdos and stalkers (and master the block) or hand control over to your PR team.

I said roughly the same thing when I’d heard Stephen Fry had gotten into it with a follower a couple weeks ago.

“Dear celebrities, the world is full of idiots your PR people have never let get near you / Either learn to deal with that like the rest of us have or let your PR people do your tweeting”

I think a lot of celebrities probably have been sheltered by their PR handlers from reality and from the hate mail I’m sure most of them get. Nobody filters them out of Twitter like that. Everyone else has had to learn to ignore trolls, a lesson celebrities need to learn before they jump into social media.

Reply