First off, as Paramount celebrates an astonishing $201 million five-day weekend (second only to The Dark Knight) for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, questions are being asked about its unscrupulous marketing techniques. Thanks to some 'investigative journalism' on the part of Sci-Fi Wire (hardly Woodward and Bernstein but commendable nonetheless), it's emerged that Paramount has been looking to counteract the astonishingly poor reviews by activating some good old-fashioned word-of-mouth to stimulate interest.
The problem is, in treating the public like idiots they've unwittingly showcased their own lack of brain-power. Why else would they activate hundreds of anonymous Twitter accounts and use the exact same message, in order to try and get the word out there that Transformers wasn't a painfully tedious car-wreck? Whether or not these mind-numbingly vacuous posts inspired anyone to drag themselves to a multiplex to see 150 minutes of whirring machinery is hard to tell, but this should still be cautionary tale for marketeers who think that social networking sites are an easy way into their target audience's mindset.
Twitter has also given a wealth of celebrities the opportunity to claim their own share of Michael Jackson's limelight directly, rather than waiting for the press to come to them (unlike Liz Taylor who hilariously issued a statement through her publicists that she was too grief-stricken to issue a statement about how grief-stricken she was). Peter Andre, Jenni Falconer, Chris Fountain and Philip Schofield are just some of the non-entities who've managed to shoehorn themselves into the international dialogue about Jackson's passing by sharing their 'shock and sadness' in a public forum. All of this rampant twittering has ultimately seen Michael Jackson dominate 15% of all posts, apparently three times more than any other subject in the history of the site.
Also adding to the dialogue are more established Twittebrities, whose prolific postings are threatening to supercede whatever it was they were famous for in the first place. Despite the fact that no-one I know can name a single film they can recall seeing him in, Ashton Kutcher made international headlines by being the first person to claim one million followers. Likewise, Lindsay Lohan prefers to Tweet about her ex-girlfriend or what she thinks Justin Timberlake has been getting up to, rather than concentrating on what used to be her day job.
It should come as no surprise that such unprecedented access to celebrities has seen the creation of sites like CelebrityTweet! a website which offers you the chance to 'stalk celebrities on Twitter!' Marc Chapman and John Hinckley Jr must be gutted that they were born too early to miss out on all the fun.
But isn't that what's really changed here? Celebrity used to be the price you paid for following your art, but not anymore. Now, your success is measured in the number of people following you, and surely there's a fine line between that and stalking. Only now, celebrities are all too willing to open themselves up and share the mundane minutiae of their lives with their adoring public. And we're only to happy to go rooting through their garbage...
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