So many folks are scolding stars like @oprah and @barbarajwalters because they’re not following-back the thousands of fans who are following them. Here is a case-in-point from Lena Claxton and Alison Woo, Don’t Make Oprah’s Twitter Mistakes:
Right now by only following 10 people, she’s using Twitter as a broadcast medium. The power in Twitter is in speaking AND listening. And for someone who already has a huge platform to speak to her audience with her TV show, she might consider using Twitter to LISTEN and engage in conversation.
Stars don’t need to follow-back. They’re stars. Their brand is secure and we don’t even need to engage in a conversation with us, necessarily. And, if Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey do a good enough job at nodding, winking, and sharing insights into their lives, their process, and their experience, that’s good enough, because they’re stars, they’re not like us, and they don’t really need our approval.
Additionally, if an A-list celeb is following everyone back and responding to all convos and carefully-reading their Twitter stream to the tune of 300,000+ follow-backs, it will probably end up not being the star or celebrity herself, but a small flock of ghost-twitterers, which is something we the fans don’t want at all.
Case-in-point why Oprah is doing it write is that tonight on Entertainment Tonight, they reported that Oprah had announced that she was cancelling a show today about Columbine — and she did it on Twitter:
@oprah I pulled the Columbine show today-After reviewing, thought it focused too much on killers-hold a thought for the families, hard day for them (via Twitter)
This kind of open and generous “broadcasting” with her viewers, fans, and the media — ET and TMZ included — is what this is all about — if, and only if, you’re not only a star but also one of the most powerful women on the planet.
I think that Columbine example is fantastic and it shows a great deal of savvy on Oprah’s part to understand the relevance of using Twitter for an announcement like this. I also agree with you that there is no way that celebrities like Oprah could follow all their fans because they would be drowned out by the number of @ tags.
However, it is interesting to scroll through a list of celebrities and seeing how few people they follow. Ellen follows 20 Twitter accounts most of which are institutions like the NYT or other celebrities. Clearly, Ellen has more than 10 real friends on Twitter but she has chosen not to follow them and not to engage in a Twitter conversation as if she was a normal person. I would be fine with celebrities not following everyone except for their closest friends and those they know offline if they at least engaged in real conversations on the service. To not do that, though, shows that they only see it as a broadcasting medium.
Maybe Ellen does not have more than ten close friends who are ON Twitter, though. I mean, a lot of these celebs, aside from Ashton Kutcher, are not spring chickens and probably don’t have a lot of real Twitter friends. Until now, Twitter has been a seriously-geeky, nerdy, vertical, “select” group of people who are into this sort of thing. Twitter is very different from Facebook. In order to really make Twitter work for you, Twitter demands that one constantly creates, creates, creates. You don’t need to feed into Facebook with such earnestness — it can be more like a student union.
These celebrities don’t have the sort of interest in learning the protocols of Twitter or really investing in Twitter culture — for now. Actors, for example, like Kutcher, oftentimes have a lot of downtime between projects, so it will be super-interesting to see how deeply and completely Hollywood and celebrity worldwide end up committing to Twitter.
That said, I am grateful — super grateful — that these Twelebs have brought every single morning and daytime TV-viewer on the continent onto Twitter — that might very well change the pH balance of the entire Twittosphere — only time will tell.
Will it “ruin” Twitter? No way!