My Brush with Celebrity

At my job I am the official company twitterer. While skeptical at first I have come to love the instant access to information. I was, by far, the first one I know to hear that Michael Jackson died. I knew today the second the space shuttle took off, even if I didn't bother to watch it.

By watching the Twitscoop I follow every major story such as the Sotomayor hearings without having to read about it - I know at any second who is asking a question and then I might see a tweet with a snarky remark about it.

During Michael Jackson's funeral thing, I watched the names of the celebrities who sang & spoke pop up big and then die down until the next one popped so I knew who had attended and some keywords about what they said. I didn't want or need more than that little bit of information.

But the most exciting thing to happen on twitter is when someone "retweets" your message - meaning they forward it on so the people who follow them can see it too. It's the meat of the viral aspect of twitter. Generally the people who retweet me are a small group of loyalists with a common interest (ie industry folk).

And on a rare occasion you get a celebrity. My friend at TruTV bragged for weeks about the time Ashton Kutcher (who has over 2 million followers) tweeted about TruTV. They were high on that for ages. Then they had Cindy McCain tweeting about them. So she had 2 celebrities in a row, and I had kind of a secondary one when a few weeks ago Jane Fonda posted one of my company's videos on her blog and then tweeted about it. That was exciting but it wasn't a retweet.

Then, yesterday, to my great delight, I tweeted about this amazing video. In fact, I love this video so much I broke my own personal rule of not tweeting about something more than once (unless it's something appropriate like an invitation to an upcoming event) and I sent out that video 3 times. On the 3rd time I got the best retweet of my twitter career: the lead singer of Paul Revere and the Raiders retweeted it. It was a day of celebration.

However, the part of this long and boring story (if you are still with me, which I doubt you are) that really tickled me was that when I called the husband to brag about my conquest I told him "the guy from Paul Revere & the Raiders retweeted me" he answered, without missing a beat, "oh you mean Mark Lindsay?" How the hell did he know that? And why then can't he remember to buy cat food?

So this link is from the same show Mark Lindsay was on (and the actual reason the husband remembered his name) and even though it is not Paul Revere OR the Raiders, it is a rendition of Hey Joe that I never in my life would have thought existed.