real ass social media.

This weekend, I became “internet famous.” Not me, actually, but my work: Britney Spears’ Twitter account.  The reviews were mixed, which was humbling and education and ultimately, the best thing for me.

• Techcrunch: Michael Arrington liked us, but not as much as he likes Rihanna.
• Gary the Wine Guy came DOWN. And I’ve learned a lot and changed course already.
• Mashable challenged us for authenticity, and I’m upping it, I promise.
• Six Apart is just thrilled we’re using moveable type.

The themes of these articles and their varied comments boil down to this:

• Keep it authentic. Britney herself needs to twitter or the personality needs to be clear.
• Celebrity Twitter could really help twitter cross over to the mainstream.
• There are a few people who you can tell have had jobs running the MySpace or community of a celebrity. These people get the challenges. The rest of them cannot comprehend why Britney isn’t always twittering herself.

Initially, I was really surprised that anyone actually thought Britney has anything to do with her own online world. I really think people who love social media like we do forget how little everyone else cares. It’s not hard to twitter, but it’s hard to care about twitter.

But the real question is this:

Every site has a culture. Twitter’s is of authenticity and casual back and forth communication, but it really has a lot of other uses as well. Twitter is a tool- used by Barack Obama to state his location and drive traffic back for fundraising. Used by the LA fire department to update people on fires. Used by bloggers to post links to nothing but their new posts. Used by @__atdell for customer service. While twitter to casual users is a culture, Twitter is a tool. Does that culture trump the tool?

And lastly, no one thinks Obama twitters himself, and 100,000 of us follow him. Why are you so mean to Britney about it?

Oy, @therealbritney was a bad username choice. :/