First, a story: Once upon a time, there lived a fair(ly) young princess who blogged about classical music PR from her Happily Ever Harlem tower. On one particular morning, she used a word to describe a Dragon of Industry that angered him. In retrospect, a less cavalier synonym would have conveyed her point, but it was too late: the Evil Wizard Internet had swept up the post and the Google Alert Fairy had delivered The Word to everyone who would read it. Now the Dragon protects his cave, because the Blog Princess cannot be trusted and may actually be a Poison-Apple-Wielding Blog Witch in disguise. They would all basically live happily ever after, but not together. The End.
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MySpace exploded on the scene when I first started working at IMG Artists. Each department got an intern, and while I was looking through Old Fashioned Resumes, a colleague of mine was clicking through MySpace pages. “We’ll learn more from here than we will from those resumes,” he advised. Onto MySpace I went, and lo and behold, there we had potential employees double-fisting 40s, girls kissing girls, and lots of…*exciting*…Halloween costumes. Not ideal for a publicity intern, although I guess that depends on how one defines “publicity.” For those of you who don’t know, unlike Facebook and like Twitter, MySpace pages are viewable by the public; that is, you don’t have to be a member yourself to see what people have posted there. While Facebook is private, so many people have joined at this point (and can have secret accounts) that “private” is essentially public.
Around this time, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, etc. featured stories about how Facebook and MySpace were affecting job interviews and college admissions. Students would spend a lifetime building the perfect college application only to have their young life’s work squandered by some choice language on a friend’s Facebook wall. Similarly, artists, publicists and managers can spend their days putting forth the best possible image for themselves and their clients, but one Tweet about hating a venue, one blog post about a journalist, and everything we’ve all be working for can be spoiled. And as a publicist friend once e mailed to me, “I can make my client look good, get her on TV, protect her image, but I can’t help her if she wants to Tweet about True Blood getting her all hot and being a metaphor for her life.” True Blood, the Downfall of Us All. (Which reminds me: Eric the Vampire, c-a-l-l me.)
I follow Imogen Heap on Twitter because, while I don’t love her music, I think she or someone on her team is a marketing genius. My fellow ArtsJournal blogger Andrew Taylor over at The Artful Manager writes about the success of her most recent album here. Consider yourself warned, Heap: I fully plan on stealing you Flickr album art competition at some point. Yesterday, though, Imogen Heap got my publicist hackles up when she Tweeted this:
Gonna see a
doctor tmw morning. Feeling pretty shocking but my throat is having the
most trouble. Not good I’m afraid. Not good at all 🙁 x
Maybe we in the classical music industry are just more (spoiler alert) conservative than other music industries, but I couldn’t help but think of the ramifications if, say, soprano Danielle de Niese had posted this same thing on her Twitter feed. Her manager would have gotten twenty phone calls, probably within an hour. The Times writers who follow her on Twitter would probably have mentioned something to the Arts, Briefly editors. Her publicist would have had to do damage control for a week. Rumors that she was getting surgery would have started flying.
Imogen Heap did, in fact, cancel her concerts. She Tweets:
I’m so so sorry
but I’m cancelling tonight’s show. Just seen the doctor. Throat’s not
in good shape. More soon. Really gutted. Bad start 🙁No…@therealahhmee, don’t leave! I’m so sorry. I’m not gonna make it tonight. I feel awful to disappoint you and everyone else. X x
Hoping to do
tomorrow’s show. Will sleeeeep lots. Santa barbara… Will let you know
about rescheduling or refund. This is so crap!! Xxx
Well, this made me think: yes, she’s revealing that she’s sick and ultimately canceling her concerts, but maybe telling her 1,250,481 (!!!) followers herself lessens the blow. Would they rather read it from her “personally” with x’s and o’s, or get a formal e mail from a promoter telling them their tickets would be refunded? Who can stay mad at someone who says they’re “Really gutted,” after all? And let’s not forget how composer Nico Muhly said the New York Philharmonic’s website looked like a Tampax ad in an interview with the Boston Globe and then reiterated the sentiment on his blog in September 2008. The epilogue to this story is, of course, that the New York Philharmonic paid for and will premiere a new work by Nico this spring. In both cases, no damage done, not damage control required.
So I, as a publicist, am torn: MySpace (at one point), Facebook, blogs, tumblr accounts and Twitter are all fantastic ways for artists to connect with current and potential audiences, and when used well can be a more powerful PR tool than a major newspaper feature. On the flip side, though, we all get lulled into a false sense of security with these things. This morning, for example, I almost Tweeted, “Do you think my neighbors can hear me singing ‘Giants in the Sky’ in the shower?” Backspace, backspace, backspace; you are a PR PROFESSIONAL, Ameer – you know better than to put anything about THE SHOWER on the Interweb! (Of course now I just did, so apparently I do not know better.)
Incidentally, this goes both ways. During the World Series, I noticed that one New York writer
implied on Twitter that he would rather watch the next evening’s
baseball game than review the (presumably boring) concert he was
assigned to. If it had been my client’s concert and it was “in print”
that the critic reviewing didn’t really want to be there? I would be
furious and dead-set on requesting another writer or none at all.
You get sucked in. You think no one’s “actually” reading (they are) and you think no one “actually” cares (they do). As mentioned above, I’ve gotten myself into trouble with some folks in The Industry with this blog. Sure, some of my in-the-doghouse episodes come down to differences in opinion about a publicist having a blog, but some of them are squarely my fault. Would I say things I write here in an interview with a newspaper, blog, radio station or magazine? Mostly, but not entirely. Why not control the media we can actually control?
My friend Patty who blogs at OboeInsight has some great advice/perspective on comments we make online, which basically boils down to “don’t say anything you don’t want your mother to hear about.” However, I agree with your analysis of the Imogen Heap situation, and the way it demonstrates a shift in the paradigm. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc., help create a personal connection between public figures and their audience, and that makes us expect some of this “inside scoop”-type level of detail. We have to learn how to negotiate a balance that maintains relationships and builds audience interest without damaging one’s career or professional standing.
Facebook and MySpace are amazing ways to stay in touch and find people from years past, but I feel they can be the single most damaging thing to a person’s career if not used properly.
I’ve been careful to keep my page completely free of profanity and anything at all inappropriate. (Being friends with several college professors as well as my mother tends to help motivate that…).
But even a squeaky clean page can still paint a negative picture of a person if they spend all their free time on things like Farmville, if it’s showing up on their page.
Twitter is SO dangerous! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been backstage wrangling talent before a performance and been tempted to pull out my phone and vent my frustration for all the world to read through a tweet. Of course, it’s the “all the world to read” part that stops me. People know where I work, and if just one wrong person read something negative I tweeted about an artist or my organization, things could go downhill REAL fast. So, alas, I’m forced to keep my complaints confined to my husband and co-workers. Less satisfying, but definitely safer.
I came to Twitter earlier this year and was immediately struck by the differences between Twitter and Facebook – Twitter is all about your brand, even if that is just your brand as a person. The kinds of status updates that are great writing in Facebook are poor form on Twitter. I think that these different social networking spaces will acquire social grammars over time that mean that breaches of the social contract become more rare, but it’s fun living in a time when everyone is experimenting their way into new codes of conduct.
Michelle wrote: “But even a squeaky clean page can still paint a negative picture of a person if they spend all their free time on things like Farmville, if it’s showing up on their page.”
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A perfectly squeaky-clean page can also have another unintended effect: losing half the real personality and charm of that person.