The point of my blog post was that we are not holding celebrities up to the same social media “rules” that are being enforced on companies and I, personally, think that’s hypocritical.

What do I mean by the rules? Social media folks are constantly beating up and berating companies for not engaging in conversation. And when a Domino’s or Motrin situation erupts they dissect it and analyze it to death with the fault always falling on the company.

What you’ve described as what Oprah has done as social media (TV, the Internet and Webcasts) describes what a lot of companies have been doing for many years also. And sorry, I don’t consider the TV, Internet and webcasts to be social media.

Social media, according to Wikipedia is:

“… information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).”

As a media mogul, what has Oprah done to allow her viewers be a part of content generation or to have control in what shows, articles, etc. that Oprah produces?

Yes, there are communities on Oprah’s site, so I give her credit for that, but that’s people connecting with other people on her platform over a common interest. But Oprah herself is not engaged. So from that regard, she doesn’t represent social media at least for me personally. Is she using social media tools? Sure…for one way broadcasting and anyone can do that.

As for her Twitter account, I would suspect over time it won’t really be Oprah, but her staff tweeting…if they even keep it up. But again, she is not engaging, just broadcasting. I get the sense right now Oprah and her staff have ‘shiny object syndrome’ thanks to Mr. Kutcher.

“In Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America, Kathleen Rooney describes Winfrey as “a serious American intellectual who pioneered the use of electronic media, specifically television and the Internet, to take reading—a decidedly non-technological and highly individual act—and highlight its social elements and uses in such a way to motivate millions of erstwhile non-readers to pick up books.”

I would say she’s been creating social media a lot longer then most of the SM experts we have today. It just wasn’t called social media back then. But, what do you call getting people together, both physically & through the internet, to discuss a topic or series of topics.

And, in 2008, she did the live, weekly webcasts with Elkhart Tolle and millions of people to create a social network around his book and teachings. Wasn’t that social media?

But now we’d suggest that because she’s late to the Twitter game, she doesn’t really know about SM. Well, that would be correct if SM was simply Twitter. But it’s not. Again, from Wikipedia:

Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business.

As I said, Oprah started her book clubs in 1996, using the internet as a key tool to help people form relationships around the books. That would mean she’s been in the SM game for 13 years, right? Wouldn’t that qualify her as at least knowledgeable about SM?

In terms of the recent jump into Twitter by celebrities, I would think the real question is whether or not they’re authentic accounts. I don’t mean just that they’re not hijacked accounts, but whether or not that person is actually posting the tweets. What happens to the value of this communication tool when it’s done by ghostwriters instead of the real person? Isn’t that a better question for us to be discussing?

In terms of BlogWorld, I would think that she’s pretty well qualified to be a keynote speaker about the value of connecting people through new media.

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