• 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. :/

“WTF, Pete Cashmore, have you ever tried to use that new site for anything real?”

“And Zuck, if you make Facebook any f’in harder to market on…Grrrr.”

Zoom out to Lauren Kozak, checking her tech and marketing feeds every morning. This blog is born from my deep frustation with the consultants and bloggers who rant about social media and marketing, who dictate its ethics, who make bustling, semi-famous careers, but don’t actually DO it.  Especially not for a corporation or another entity.

I am a social media professional There are two kinds: There are kids plodding away at agencies or loners placed in confused marketing departments of trying-really-hard corporations. And then there are people who go to BarCamp and Geek Dinners and get photographed at Mashmeet and if they’re lucky, get on Valleywag. This blog is a big screw you to the latter, and finally an outlet for the former, the people who truly work in social media.

Here, we’re going to talk about the real challenges of social media without free reign. When clients want to approve every blogger review you secure. When they call you every 45 minutes to ask, “Have we gone viral yet?”   When they get you to launch a twitter and then only email you once a week. We’re also, though, going to talk about awesome execution and real techniques, technology to make life easier and what works in the real world.