When a Tweet is Worth a Hundred Thousand Clicks

I don't really know who Selena Gomez is. I know she exists and that she's famous.

Through a prolonged case of internet sleb osmosis I know she's dating Justin Bieber and has received death threats for doing so. Until yesterday I didn't know she was starring in a new movie, one which was previewed in Cannes, and one which was mentioned in a round-up of the festival by one of our HeyUGuys writers. 

Today I know who she is, and the immense power she wields. 

As the editor of a website I spend most of my day staring at words, when I'm not doing that armies of statistics march in front of my eyes. When an article attracts a crowd I know about it, and I'm keen to find out why. So when Selena Gomez tweeted the following, linking to our site, ...

     "Yay Springbreakers!!! So happy for everyone that worked on this film."

... we bore the brunt of exactly 11,574,616 followers coming our way. Then the 30,692,004 people who chose to 'like' her on Facebook starting coming. The site was toppled and we had our best day ever by far. All from a single tweet. I'm in awe of the power these people have.

The film in question is something of a departure for Gomez, a Harmony Korine directed film which the OMG section of Yahoo News called 'racy' and 'Sex-Filled' when they reported on her tweeting a link to our article.

I'm not sure what I find more galling: the fact that there's an OMG section of anything or that a tweet to a news article is itself considered newsworthy. When the very fact that there's news is news then we're in danger of losing the essence of what is important. 

Facebook and Twitter and the ubiquity of the social connection have turned celebrities into marketing machines and we all play our part but the sheer tonnage of attention heaped upon us today from one tweet is a raw display of power.

Combining the Facebook fans and Twitter followers of Gomez, Beiber, Lady Gaga, Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher gives us a total of 243 million pairs of eyes watching just those five people. 

I now know who Selena Gomez is, and the legion of fans who follow her, virtually or otherwise, and while we bore the brunt of Hurricane Selena tomorrow it'll be someone else, the next day someone else.  

Mark Twain said 'A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes' and now a single message can, truth or lie, make its way around the world and back again with a push of a button.

Whether or not we choose to read an article on the shoe wearing habits of the truth is another matter.

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