social media influencers

Meet Social Influencer Alyssa Milano

"Consider yourself forewarned," is Alyssa Milano's Bio on Twitter.

I hate that she is a Dodger fan, but love that she is a baseball fan. She blogs on MLBlogs and is always Tweeting.

Unlike most other celebrities, she is living the social life. She reads Mashable, is a self-proclaimed geek, is right on top of Twitter community activities like #FollowFriday, comments on all the top stories in the news and will even refer her 286K+ followers to cool Twitter apps.

Go crazy Alyssa...and thanks for the forewarning, but don't change a think (except that love for the Dodgers.)

 

Go Britney Spears Go!

If you are a huge celebrity, then chances are you among the over hundred million people that have a MySpace page and a Facebook page. You (or your people) might be thinking about this "Twitter thing" that you keep hearing about, in fact Jon Stewart is even talking about it. Britney Spears is a step ahead while she reinvented herself and the new Britney is social media savvy. This is a good thing. Ad Age calls it a "tipping point for social media."

Celebrities need to build equity in their brand and it starts with building their own website that has the best of social media tools. (Britney's choice was Movable Type.) Most importantly they need to take advantage of social media and not just let their marketing people be phonies and impersonate. They need to roll up their sleeves and let their fans glimpse into their life in an authentic way. Today, she was at Toontown in Disneyland and shared a picture with her boys. How refreshing that she is building her equity through a website that she owns. Rather than leak something through TMZ or Perez Hilton, she is releasing exclusives directly into her website, alerting her 315K Twitter followers (this was a mistake linking to Twitpik vs. her website.) Not only does she have her people post updates, but she will post herself under    "~Brit"

Maybe she will also:

• blog from her tour bus, concert, airport
• show more personal photos
• feature her fans and start a dialogue with them
• allow her fans to build a community on her site
• auction off Britney stuff for charity on Ebay
• showcase other up and coming artist that she believes in
• stitch together promotional deals across her entire social media presence
• release her next single online

Either way, great job Britney, keep it up & don't stop the conversation.

Social Media Influencer: Tila Tequila

Tila Tequila (Tila Tequila's MySpace)

You might laugh when thinking that Tila Tequila helped shape social media. Aside from a modern version of the American Dream (F. Scott Fitzgerald must be laughing looking down on this one.) Miss Tequila is a great example of the power of the network effect as she has amassed 3,526,395 friends. Lil John is in her top 8 and vice versa.  Once her friends got into the millions, savvy brands were contacting her directly to craft integrated advertising deals. (That was frustrating as we were scrapping to grow the business on the monetization front!)  

Think what you may of her, but she was the first person in Hollywood to take a struggling career and leverage social media to catapult her various business endeavors w/tv, music and now a self-help book deal. God help us.