Celebrity vs. Celebrity

This afternoon I was part of a Entrepreneur Week panel discussing a variety of digital topics. In addition to myself, Darren Herman from The Media Kitchen, Rick Heitzmann, Managing Director at FirstMark Capital, Ross Goldstein, Co-Founder & Managing Director at DFJ Gotham Ventures sat on the panel and moderating panel was handled by Richie Hecker from Boostrapper.

During the panel, we discussed the new crop of social sites and one of the panelists (I forgot which one) mentioned that we are now all celebrities. He continued that not only are we celebrities but we are also paparazzi. I added that there is a difference between celebrities and celebrities. We are going to see more and more celebrities on Twitter in the coming days and months and I thought it was worth differentiating between celebrities and celebrities.

Twitter grew because it made us all into instant celebrities – we have fans (Twitter calls them followers). We like to believe that our fans give a crap about what we do (they don’t). For some, it’s clear that they believe they really are celebrities.

As we watch Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton or the million-follower “punk” say and do things on Twitter (and other Internet tools), it’s easy to think that everything they do online are things that we can also get away with. We can’t. When Britney screws up, it helps her sell future records. When Lindsay screws up, she gets more movie deals. When you or I screw up, it can affect us negatively. More importantly, it can affect us later on down the road as everything we do only travels with us 24×7 in our Internet briefcase.

It’s one thing to want to dress up like a celebrity but to mimic their online behavior could prove to be detrimental to a person’s career for the long-term. It’s bad enough that services like Twitter allow us to be instantly emotional. After the panel concluded, a few attendees mentioned that people they know have shared content online which they thought was private only to learn that other people shared the content outside.

This is the difference between celebrity and celebrity – you can’t get away with it.