4 March 2009

Twitter and the future for followers of @stephenfry

I recently joined Twitter, the microblogging platform where users share 140 character messages called ‘tweets’ with each other. I was joining millions of others who have been flooding to this rapidly growing social networking utility. One of my first actions, as it is for many new users, was to follow the Stephen Fry. The comedian and author is amongst the most popular Twitter users with over a quarter of a million subscribers to his acerbic and humourously irreverent tweets.


I'll happily admit it was perfectly entertaining to read about his celebrity dining experiences and whale watching. But what is more interesting is the star’s struggle to control his army of fans and prevent the experience he describes as ‘wonderful’ being ruined by his very popularity. Perhaps it was always going to be so. That a system allowing instant messaging would before long leave a celebrity swamped and struggling to enjoy the more personal interaction they had previously.

The signs were there right from the beginning, when just a few hours after his first tweet in October 2008 he was already warning ‘I wish I could answer you all individually, but I'm afraid that isn't possible’. This was just a brief forerunner to recent blog articles he has written expressly to request that followers adjust their behaviour in order to avoid him becoming swamped. The longest, written while out at sea off the coast of Baja California, asks followers not to send questions until they’d checked his previous tweets for the answers. Or in his other words ‘to use your own initiative’. This plea to lift the siege of his followers weighed in at over 6,000 more characters than a tweet would allow – suggesting that micro-blogging can only get you so far.

Fry also points to people using Twitter as a sales opportunity, distancing himself from such activity. But, while the stream of tweets he has written are informative and certainly not centred on self-promotion, his profile advertises t-shirts carrying the slogan ‘I tweeted Stephen Fry and all I got was this luxurious T-shirt’. Whether this is post-modern irony or just bad is open to interpretation. What is certainly the case is that most people, those who use Twitter for sales included, have to work a lot harder than that for their money.



In a recent appearance on Jonathan Ross’s chat show, Fry tried a couple of times to change the subject when Twitter was raised - perhaps already realising that his volume of fans was becoming unmanageable. If the intention was to limit the tidal wave of new Fry followers in the hope of saving any sense of intimacy, the 150,000 new members since the interview would suggest that it has failed.


Probably, one of the options left to Stephen Fry would be to employ someone to manage his account, something one senses would be too ostentatious for him. He could just provide tweets and ignore the replies and messages that come his way (as other celebrities do), or to stop tweeting altogether. I suspect the latter is unlikely, as where else could he revel in messages such as one posted under his recent photograph of a Mexican Burger King – ‘Mayonnaise repulses me as it is the devil’s seaman’. (sic) Ahoy there Lucifer!

1 comment:

  1. 23:39 - Amended version to reduce some amazingly long sentences!

    ReplyDelete