Beauty and the Beast – A Social Media Tale

Don’t be too quick to guess the storyline, the real beauty and beast are still to feature in this post!

If you’re reading this you will probably have an interest in at least one of:  social media, the handsome Ashton Kutcher or the sudden rise to stardom of  reality TV contestant, Susan Boyle.

If you are none of those, have no idea what social media even means or have been living in a cave for the last two weeks, let me provide you with a bit of context.

Two significant milestones in social media were achieved last week.

1 Actor, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) became the first Twitter user to reach 1 Million followers, beating CNN to that number

2 Susan Boyle’s performance on ‘Britain’s got talent’ became YouTube’s most viral video ever, with over 100 Million views.

So the story begins like this, Ashton realises that he’s got shit loads of Twitter followers and he posts this video on YouTube…

Later on he announced that he would personally donate 10’000 mosquito nets to help fight malaria in Africa, should he win the race. That was cool.

Then the mainstream media machine really gets cranked on, and Oprah gets in on the act… not cool.

Let me get into the second part of the story. If you haven’t yet seen or heard of Susan Boyle, you’re out of luck just now because ITV and youtube have still not reached an agreement on how to monetize the video. Which means that 100 Million views later, not one penny has been made. That story is for another day, but it also means that at the publishers request, the video cannot be viewed outside of youtube. I’ll drop the link at the end of the post.

Now, unfortunately for me, Susan Boyle happens to live two miles down the road from me, so just a couple of days after her appearance, this is how i felt…

Needless to say, I’ve had to kick some asses. The geriatric trauma department in the local hospital has never been so busy.

Less than two weeks on and the kids in south park are freaking out about the same thing…

The real beauty in all of this is that someone like Susan Boyle – unemployed, lives with her cats, never been kissed – can almost over night become one of the most talked about names in the world. All through the viral power of the Internet.

Now, I am nor forgetting that she had to be on a reality TV show first for this to happen – that helped. But Simon Cowell and the TV programme haven’t made her such a sensation, the Internet has. Without YouTube and twitter this story would have gone as far as every other reality TV story has. Possibly win the talent show, appear on the front pages, live the dream for a year. Chewed up and spat back out by the Beast in this story – Mainstream Media.

The Beast is threatening to destroy  a great online community, twitter. Millions of new users are now joining, which is great for Twitter as a business, but as far as the value of the community is concerned, a lot of these new users are only jumping on board to see what celebrities are doing. Aren’t TV, the movies and glossy magazines enough for that? 

As for Ashton… dude, you’re a Hollywood star, of course you’ve got shit loads of followers! Reaching a million for you shouldn’t be that much of an achievement. If a peasant like me was to get a million – now, that would be something @evenflowdave  ;-) .

So what do you think, should Celebrities be allowed to take over Social Media?

Comments from Ashton, Oprah and other celebs welcome! 

Susan Boyle on Britain’s got talent

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1. Cameron Reilly – Media Rebel