Posts Tagged ‘stephen fry’

DIY PR was back in the news over the weekend, when Stephen Fry landed in hot water with the broadsheets for comments he made about women’s sexuality and then took to Twitter to try and resolve the furore.

It’s a perfect way to highlight the dangers of do it yourself PR; like some hapless DIY electrician, the celebrity who tries to engage in their own publicity is likely to burn the house down if they are not really careful.

If even an articulate, interesting, engaging and thoroughly metropolitan man such as Stephen Fry, a man who knows how to shimmy around a crowd and impress or charm the best of us, can get into hot water and be unable to fix it via Twitter, there is surely something to be said for good PR after all. Read the rest of this entry »

There has been a lot of debate about the relevance of PR council to the stars since the Twitter revolution. Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher and Ross Brydon all do a pretty good job of managing to reach out to their fans. With these examples, and others, in mind, stars like Kanye West may wonder why they need to spend money on a PR when they have the DIY tools at their fingertips. But Kanye is proof positive that some slebs need sound and serious PR advice before they attempt to engage their fans over the net.

West has been letting rip on Twitter with unrelenting detail about himself. He has picked a fight with a journalist from the LA Times music blog who had the temerity to accidentally miss out a word from the title of his album but the incident that generated the most ire was his use of a robot to pump out 300 tweets in a few minutes containing lyrics and some nasty invective.
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I spent a little of last night, as the festive season faded and a whole new year and the return to work hove into view, watching the latest iteration of Celebrity Big Brother wipe it’s arse across my TV screen. As the usual array of desperate people, half-arsed film heroes and one hit blips on the music radar began to settle into the Big Brother house, in much the same fashion as their predecessors had last year, I got to thinking – is 2010 going to be any different from 2009? Will we have ANYTHING new in the coming months, rather than just a retread of everything that’s gone before? As we seep into January, it seems not. Read the rest of this entry »

Now the dust has cleared – a little – in the wake of Jan Moir’s Mail article looking at the circumstances surrounding the death of Stephen Gately and the subsequent outpouring of Twitter anger, it’s worth asking what the difference is between Moir’s article, aimed at a certain set of like-minded readers, and the response on Twitter.

However ugly and unpalatable Moir’s insinuations were, there will always be celebrities and personalities in the public eye facing deconstruction, valid or not, and there will always be snarky columnists at the Mail. But it would help, if there is to be a mass outpouring of fury on Twitter in response, if it were more akin to constructive debate; it was disappointing to see that much of the response was simply mass retweeting of a few salient tweets from the likes of Stephen Fry.

It was an effective campaign, certainly, given that the Mail lost a number of high profile advertisers from the online article. But it was very much a case of an angrily bleating herd retweeting a few choice points – in much the same way as Moir’s supporters reiterated her views.

It’s interesting to note that the Mail have run a couple of big articles looking into the Twitter phenomenon over the weekend – they were clearly unsettled by the likes of Marks and Spencer pulling adverts – but I am not sure that, once the dust settles, the Mail will change its modus operandi significantly.

The only way that is likely to happen is if the masses use Twitter to voice their own opinions, rather than just relying on a few informed celebrities to dictate their opinions. The only way Twitter can become a truly democratic tool is if people find their own voice.

It will certainly be interesting to see what Moir has to say on Friday, once the dust has settled, and what reaction her response engenders.