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. <\/p>\n
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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. <\/p>\n
Around this time, the Wall Street Journal<\/i>, New York Times<\/i>, 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<\/i> getting her all hot and being a metaphor for her life.” True Blood, <\/i>the Downfall of Us All. (Which reminds me: Eric the Vampire, c-a-l-l me.) <\/p>\n
I follow Imogen Heap on Twitter<\/a> 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<\/i> writes about the success of her most recent album here<\/a>. Consider yourself warned, Heap: I fully plan on stealing you Flickr album art competition<\/a> at some point. Yesterday, though, Imogen Heap got my publicist hackles up when she Tweeted this:<\/p>\n Gonna see a
\ndoctor tmw morning. Feeling pretty shocking but my throat is having the
\nmost trouble. Not good I’m afraid. Not good at all \ud83d\ude41 x<\/span><\/span>