Kanye West was anything but shy in voicing his opinions about Twitter last year. It was very clearly (and if text can be loud then very, very loudly) documented that he once had a small distaste for the social media wonder-bird:
“I DON’T HAVE A F*CKING TWITTER… WHY WOULD I USE TWITTER???”
“EVERYTHING THAT TWITTER OFFERS I NEED LESS OF.”
But then, to those concerned, came huge news. Only July 28, Mr. West unveiled @kanyewest, and declared to the world with vigor, “Up early in the morning taking meetings in Silicone Valley.”
Fans joyfully clicked “follow,” as a sign of approval. Some thoughtful folks put together a website that merged The New Yorker cartoons with tweets from @kanyewest, creating pleasantly bemusing scenes that even caught the eye of Kanye himself, and social media experts predicted his legion of Twitter followers to grow exponentially. An article by Eric Ditzian of MTV.com featured social media expert Chris Heuer saying:
“Kanye is doing this brilliantly.”
Yet there were still some skeptics. Ditzian also spoke with Dave Malby, who, according to his twitter profile is “Addicted 2 Biz & Soc Media.”
“I find that he is not engaging with his fans,” says Malby. “This is not what Twitter is about. Twitter is about engagement and interaction.”
And while Mr. West still only follows 17 people — 16 of them models who could hide behind a piece of yarn — he went on an engagement binge late last night. In the last 20 hours, Kanye has re-tweeted 131 of his followers — all of which were postings of lyrics from his songs.
I tracked his followers for an hour after I realized what was happening and saw nearly 3,000 people step out of line with Kanye, unhappy with the barrage of tweets from other people under his name.
Twitter is not immune to overexposure, as many media outlets are finding out with continual headline dumps. So where is that very fine line that rests between a canary chirping every so often and that bird that perches next to your window, cawing incessantly three hours before you’re supposed to wake up?
