The online meet and greet

Finding a celebrity on Twitter is an easy task. A lot of  celebrities have Twitter to stay in touch with their fans and some of them are know to actually reply to tweets from fans. In most cases, this just means a general tweet thanking people for all of theirs or an answer to a question that’s been asked a lot. But sometimes, the celebs tweet back…

For my situation, I’ll first have to provide with some backstory on my Twitter usage over the last couple of years. I don’t remember the exact date when I signed up, but because of my love for social media and anything new, it was probably in the early years of Twitter. My initial Twitter usage wasn’t very active; I mostly used it to check up on some music artists I like who were already using the medium. Over the years some friends signed up, Twitter got bigger and more and more celebrities started using Twitter. My own usage became more active and nowadays a tweet flies around the web at least once or twice a day.

When I read the assignment I already took a liking to it. In the time I have been using Twitter I already have tried and succeeded to contact some (albeit lesser-known) celebrities. I mostly had contact with some people in bands I really love, which is why Twitter is such an amazing medium. It allows for ordinary people to actually send their idols a direct message. A way of feeling connected with them in a way you might never get a chance to in other ways. This is probably what separates Twitter from other social media services like Facebook or Myspace, it’s more personal. I feel that celebrities do post more personal updates on Twitter than these other websites.

For this assignment, I followed and tried contacting Jack Black. It’s really too bad it turns out he’s not a very active Twitter user. When he tweets, it’s mostly to promote some of his new work.  But he struck me as the kind of guy who might actually reply to a tweet. So far, no luck. I like to think it’s because of his lack of activity, but it also might be because he gets these things a lot and doesn’t have time to reply to them at all.

So the international level didn’t turn out so well for this assignment. I hoped I’d have more success on a national level. So, I contacted Randy van Velde, a DJ who has been making a name for himself in the club scene. His tweets are usually about him being at a party, when, where and with whom. Sometimes there are a little more personal tweets, which is nice for a change. Now, I have been following this guy for some time and I know he replies to his followers sometimes. When I was at a party last week where he was playing,  I asked him to play a song for me… The reply I got some time later(translated from Dutch) was: “It is on”. Now I never did get to hear that song, but I really liked the fact that he replied. And it was definitely on!

Summing up, I know Twitter is really rising up to it’s potential. To be just a little bit more personal than Facebook and adding a new dimension to fandom. I guess the good old fashioned meet and greet with your favourite celebrity is, like so many things, relocating to the internet. Despite that, I’d still love to meet and greet with say, a Jack Black or one of my other favourite artists…